


My Heart In Hiding

by AstridContraMundum



Series: After-comers Cannot Guess [2]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: AU, Angst, Domestic Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, art heist, trying to reconcile Morse's wonky childhood timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 19:34:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 59,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15825531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: When Thursday first brought Morse's record player out of his car, Pagan was visited by a desire to run up to him, to seize it from his hands, and to smash it against the ground.But once something is smashed, it's difficult to put it back together.A sequel to After the Bacchanal





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to everyone who left kudos and such lovely comments on After the Bacchanal! 
> 
> This is a sequel to that story, so there will be quite a few flashback scenes and references that won't make a lot of sense if you haven't read that one, but I'm sure you could always just roll with it if you had a mind to ... :0) 
> 
> Every chapter will be divided in half: one half Bixby's POV/one half Morse's . . .  
>    
> Thanks for reading!

January 1970  Colmar, France

 

Bixby walks through the marketplace with his shoulders hunched against the wind, taking long strides to more quickly reach the warmth of his car. A sudden gust kicks up, ruffling his dark hair, and he reaches a hand out of the pocket of his black wool coat to smooth it.

Colmar just isn’t the same in January, Bixby thinks. The half-timber houses that line the dark canals look bereft without their window box tumbles of geraniums, their torrent of flowering vines.

But there is one thing that catches his eye: a dazzlingly tricked-out shop with an array of paintings in the window. Most of them are quite modern, all elaborately arranged lines and bursts of bright color. Three stripes of blurry blue across a canvas, doubtless meant to represent the sea—that sort of thing.

Bixby is seized with an idea. He’ll buy Endeavour a painting. After all, it will be three years this May since they had their real first conversation.

_It’s a copy,” Pagan said. “A fake.”_

_“How do you know?’ Bixby asked._

_“Because the real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum. I’ve seen it.”_

_“And how do you know that the one in the Rijksmuseum isn’t the copy, and this one the real one?” Bixby asked playfully._

_“Uh . . .  I think the curators would have noticed.”_

 

It will be a bit of a joke—yes, it’s a fraud.

But who says one can’t love a fraud?

Bixby doesn’t want just any painting, though. Cheap copy or not, he wants it to have style. Maybe even to mean something. He pushes open the heavy glass door and steps inside.

 For a few moments he drifts, mingling among the easels, looking over each canvas.

“May I help you?” a woman at the counter asks.

Bixby considers for a moment. “Might you have anything, I don’t know, more impressive? I’m looking for something on a somewhat larger scale. Something more traditional, perhaps.”

The woman seems to perk up at this; she nods and gestures for him to follow her to the back of the shop. On the way, she begins to give him the spiel. There’s one painting that he simply must see. . . a truly rare item . . . she can tell he has good taste, will appreciate such a fine work.  

Please, Bixby thinks. Don’t try to hustle a hustler.

But then, he realizes that he’s actually missed this sort of game. Now that he’s been keeping his business life largely above-board, it’s been a long time since he’s indulged in this brand of theatre.

Bixby flashes a broad white smile. “That sounds perfect,” he says. “Please, lead the way.”

She takes him to a back room, where a few pieces are draped in large swaths of purple velvet cloth. Bixby suppresses a laugh. Either way, he’s definitely getting his money’s worth.

But the painting the woman uncovers takes his breath away. It’s a nativity scene of all things—a large, dark canvas, almost twice his height. The people gathered around the Christ child seem to glow against the black background, their bodies twisted—the perspective a bit amateurish, perhaps? Bixby would hardly know.

What he loves about the painting, though, is the angel above the scene, falling brightly out of the darkness—a young man with broad and delicately-feathered white wings, twisted and suspended across the top of the canvas. Bixby is immediately reminded of Endeavour.

The angel holds one long, sinewy arm up to the sky and one down towards the figures who are gathered just out of his reach below. His head is bowed and covered in curls the color of old bronze, the color Endeavour’s hair began to fade to once he left the lake house and began to live primarily indoors.

Maybe Endeavour would like it. At least he’s likely to be a bit more diplomatic about it these days if he doesn’t. One would hope.

And anyway, Bixby decides, if Endeavour doesn’t like it, he’ll keep it for himself.

“How much?” he asks.

He gets another spiel. An item so rare . . . you must have a good eye.

Yes, yes.  Besides, he’s heard this same speech before, from a well-known art dealer who had done work for both the Rijksmuseum and the Louvre.

It’s far too large for him to take it home—unless he wants to drive all the way home with the top down. Which he doesn’t especially. Besides, it might snow or sleet, and then the thing would be ruined.

But the woman says she can have it delivered to his home—if he could leave his address?

Bixby says he’ll pay half now, half when it’s delivered. She hands him a pad of paper and he writes his address.

“Have them call me before they leave, so I’ll know when to expect them. It’s a surprise for someone,” he says, adding his telephone number in a jagged flourish across the bottom of the delivery slip.

“Of course.”

It will be awfully big to hide until the spring, Bixby thinks, as he continues to walk back to his car. He’ll have to get Endeavour out of the house when it’s delivered. Or at least have Madame Zumofen call him down to the kitchen to ask him about some such thing.

He’ll hide it behind the wall-length bookcase of his study. Endeavour never goes in there.

He hopes he’ll like it. He might. There is something true about it. Something muted and understated that seems to soften edges. He thinks Endeavour might like that kind of thing.

*******

On his drive home, Bixby thinks back on the day before he left for Colmar. It had been snowing off and on for a week. The fields were white and the sky was white so that the horizon seemed almost to disappear. He and Endeavour were walking through the fields when the wind began to pick up, and it began to snow.

Snow was a rarity in Bixby’s childhood, and even after all these years, he still couldn’t help but feel a thrill of magic at the sight of it.

Especially snow like this: large, wet flakes swirling in shifting winds, tossed by an updraft then caught in a crosswind, giving the effect of thousands of miniature but distinct circular flights. It was like being inside a snow globe that had been picked up by a child, turned upside down, and set right again.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Bixby mused.

“Yes,” said Endeavour, trudging silently beside him. “It’s like being inside the mind of God.”

 

This gave Bixby pause. It wasn’t the mention of God, although that was a subject he generally avoided with Endeavour. He knew Endeavour wasn’t keen on the whole idea, and the one time Bixby did reveal his thoughts on the matter, he ended up rather the worse for wear.

Bixby was a man for whom cause and effect were a tangible reality. His whole life had been built upon them. Things happened because he made them happen. Even luck was not the result of coincidence. He had made his own luck, after all.

So it wasn’t a stretch for him to believe that so went the world: that behind all the causes that directed the flow of events there might be one cause, guiding it all.

Bixby tried to explain this once, and immediately felt over his head. But suddenly Endeavour smiled, looking positively delighted. Perhaps he understood?

“You sound like a twentieth-century dumb ox of Sicily,” Endeavour said.

Bixby blinked in surprise. Well. It certainly wasn’t as if he ever pretended to be an intellectual giant, for pity’s sake.

 So it did feel like rather a low blow.

 Then, catching the expression on Bixby’s face, Endeavour scowled, concerned. “You know,” he prompted. “St. Thomas Aquinas? The argument from causation? From the _Summa Theologica_? The dumb ox was Aquinas’ nickname, did you know?”

“Oh,” Bixby said, faintly. “Poor chap.”

“Yes. I suppose I got off easy with Pagan.” 

At any rate, it would be a while before Bixby ventured again in that direction.

 

So as they stood in the snow, it wasn’t the mention of God that troubled him.

It was the idea that Endeavour would describe this swirling confusion, this chaos of frozen bits of water, marked by no boundaries other than a whitened and blurred horizon, as in any way analogous to a mind.

And then Bixby realized.

Perhaps this was not the mind of God he was looking at.

But the mind of Endeavour?

Bixby felt saddened at the thought.

But when Bixby looked up, there he was, casting his face up to the sky, looking as content as he’d ever seen him, his blue eyes, wind-burned cheeks and tawny-gold hair the only bits of color on the white landscape.

Well, to each his own, Bixby thought.

It seemed amazing that Endeavour even managed to get up in the morning.

 

****

Suddenly, though, a lot of things about him made sense. It was almost as if the snowfall was a key, a key to understanding so many of the things about Endeavour that, to Bixby, had seemed at best quixotic, and at worst, slightly alarming.

 Once, they had been out by a lake, when, bright as a flash, a kingfisher swept from the trees and out over the water.

Anyone else might say the bird was lovely, but Endeavour looked at it and said “My heart in hiding stirred for a bird. The achieve of, the mastery of the thing.”

Bixby never knew what to make of little outbursts like that, but now he understood that to Endeavour, such a connection was as natural as breathing. Just one more synaptic snowflake that happened to whirl by.

It was sort of interesting, really. And it was what Bixby had signed on for, after all. Someone to add some shine to his sparkle, some gleam to his flash.

And, sometimes, it did make Bixby think—sometimes, he was surprised to discover that he had a degree of introspection he never would have believed he had.

Last fall, on one of the last warm nights of October, he had been up late, wrapping up a deal with a shipping firm in San Francisco.

It was a deal worth millions, and, wide awake on Pacific Time and adrenaline pumping with the thrill of success, Bixby went upstairs to find Endeavour, asleep with his bedside light on, one long arm draped over the side of the bed.

He really was lovely—head tipped back, long throat exposed. He was all austere lines, casually elegant even asleep.

Bixby sat softly on the edge of the bed and ran a hand down his side and over his flank.

“Are you awake?”

Endeavour opened a bleary blue eye. “Hmmmm?” He stretched. “What is it? What time is it?”

“I don’t know,” Bixby said. He ran his hand back up and then down, cupping Endeavour’s arse in a way that usually brought his whole body singing to attention.

“I was thinking—you wouldn’t want to take a walk, would you?” Bixby said “Out in the woods? For old time’s sake?”

Endeavour started laughing. “Now? What time is it?”  he asked again, reaching for a small clock nestled in the mess that covered his nightstand—piles of arts and entertainment sections he’d snatched from Bixby’s newspapers for the crosswords and an odd little collection of fir cones. “It’s half three! And isn’t it getting a bit cold out for that?”

“You don’t want to?” Bixby asked, keeping his hand firmly in place.

Endeavour sighed. “Why not?  I’ve been sort of expecting something like this. I didn’t suppose it would start so soon, though.”

“What?”

“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself in a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost.”

 “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bixby asked.

“Midway on our life’s journey . . .  You’re turning thirty-five in May. It’s half of seventy, the lifespan allotted to man in the Bible. It’s the same age Dante was when Virgil took him on his journey through the Inferno.”

Oh, God, not that thing.

“That’s sounds terrible,” Bixby said. “So, what, am I in for a hell of a year then?”

“Not necessarily. And besides, Dante didn’t just travel through hell, but through purgatory and paradise, too.  It’s all about coming of age, reaching new depths. Or, in other words, just a classic midlife crisis. I’d been wondering how it might manifest itself, seeing as you already own a ridiculous number of automobiles.”

All this talk of coming of age sounded just like getting old to Bixby, and frankly was sort of killing the mood.

But it was true, he thought, he had felt a bit different this past year. He had never thought he’s settle down with one person. And that, in turn, did give him a new sense of responsibility. Yes, that was all just fascinating, but. . . .

“So, do you want to go out for a walk or not?” he asked. He ran his hand along Endeavour’s flank once more, cupping his arse again, this time adding a slight upwards pressure. The wiseacre expression faded, replaced by a slightly stunned, unfocused look.

Bixby smiled. Second deal of the day sealed and it wasn’t even dawn.  

“Sure,” Endeavour said, rolling to get up. “What the hell.”

Bixby laughed.

“Hmmm?’ Endeavour asked, looking confused. Then he scowled. “Oh.”  

 

Sometimes, though, the whirlwind of connections seemed to misfire, leaving Bixby utterly bewildered.

Most often the results were harmless enough—just quirky little flights of fancy.

There was that night at dinner, when, apropos of nothing, Endeavour had asked, “Do you remember at all, how to speak in your natural accent? Or has it been so many years you’ve forgotten?”

“What on earth do you mean?”  

Endeavour gave him a look. “All those “old mans” and “rathers”—you sound sometimes like the Great Gatsby, like how an American would talk when he’s trying to mimic an English accent.”

This made Bixby laugh out loud. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

 “And you use the “old man” phrase most often when you’re nervous about something. You scarcely ever have used it when you’re talking with me, for example, except for that night you asked me about my name.”

“Was this the night you were so plastered you sang in Italian at the top of your lungs halfway back from London? It amazes me you even remember.”

Endeavour ignored this. “You say you’re from Oxford readily enough.”

“Hmmmmm,” Bixby said, returning to his dinner. Endeavour was obviously going through some sort of episode. Best not to indulge him.

“Oxford . . . . . Mississippi?”

 Bixby just shook his head.

“Your name is Joss, isn’t it? It would be awfully hypocritical of you to have hounded me so about my name if it isn’t.”

“Of course, it is.”

Was the man raving?

Endeavour nodded thoughtfully. “I thought so. If you had given yourself a name before you had known better, you might have been tempted to pick something frightfully upper crust, something from a play by Oscar Wilde, like Algernon.”

“Hmmmmm,” Bixby said.

No what that on earth prompted that?  

Did the man know him so little?

And did he actually think he’d ever read anything by Wilde?

 

Now and then, though, Endeavour seemed to make connections that doubled in upon themselves and then multiplied, veering out of control and leaving Bixby to navigate blindly in the snow.

His birthday last September, for example, had been an utter disaster.

 Bixby had thought he had formulated the perfect plan: a long walk through the forest of Darney and then they’d go over the border to Stuttgart, for dinner and German beer. He had bought tickets to the opera—it was a German one that a business associate had told him was particularly long and over the top. From there, it was a four-hour drive home, so they’d get a hotel for the night.

Bixby had smuggled Endeavour’s passport from his dresser and had it along with his in his pocket. Their evening suits he had hidden in the boot of the car.

 

Once they were off on one of the forest trails, Bixby thought he was to be quite congratulated on the idea. He might not have been to the manor born, but he had class enough to know that fine things shone all the finer when placed in the right setting—a diamond necklace on black velvet, fine Scotch in a cut-glass tumbler.

It wasn’t an accident, Bixby decided, that Endeavour had been born in September.

The colors of autumn were the perfect background for his particular form of beauty, bringing out the honey-gold of his face and the red-gold of his hair left by the long summer. He held himself with the same natural, careless, lanky elegance as the trees. All in all, it was an idyllic day.

But then, there was a flaw in the plan.

“Do you think. . . . do you think we could go home now?”

“Home?” Bixby laughed. “We’ve just got here half an hour ago.”

Endeavour said nothing.

They continued to walk, but minute by minute, it Endeavour seemed grew paler, more silent.

“Couldn’t we . . . couldn’t we go home?”

“But why?”

“I . . . never mind.”

Bixby just shook his head. They had only gone a few more steps, though, when Endeavour gave a long gasping breath and grabbed Bixby’s arm with both hands. Then he froze and looked down at his hands, as if he himself didn’t realize why he had done such a thing.

“Oh. Sorry,” he said, letting Bixby go. He started to walk on, pretending that nothing had happened, but he had the look of someone just barely able to rise above his misery.

Bixby said nothing. He always had a knack for knowing when to stop pressing his luck.  At the next fork in the path, he turned, leading Endeavour on a short cut through the trees and back to the end of the trail head.

By the time they got back to the car, Endeavour was stone-faced. He got in the car and turned away, staring out of the window. 

Bixby started the ignition. He didn’t mention his plan about taking a drive into Germany. It was clear by that point that it would be easier to get him to the moon. When Bixby reached the road outside the car park, he headed north instead of east and started for home.

When they pulled up to the house, Endeavour opened the door and swung his legs out of the car before Bixby could even put the car into park. He went up through the front door and then headed straight upstairs.

Bixby hesitated. Then followed.

He found Endeavour face down on the bed, his face crushed into a pillow, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Bixby stood in the doorway, uncertain.

The only other time Bixby had seen him lose control this way was on the day Inspector Thursday had come to the lake house with Corcoran’s letter.

And at least then there had been a clear cause. Bixby hadn’t been sure which one it was exactly. . . the idea that Bunny might have thought him a murderer and still pretended to have been his friend for years, the realization that Thursday might have finally understood he should be counted as a suspect, the dawning of the truth that the friends who had taken a boy from Lincolnshire under their wing might be killers… There could have been any number of reasons.

But as Bixby stood in the doorway, helpless, watching as Endeavour struggled for breath and replaying the events of the day in his mind, he felt at a loss. He couldn’t see anything about that morning that could have brought them to this point.  

“I’m sorry, old man,” Bixby said at last.

Endeavour gasped and looked up, as if shocked by the sound of his voice.

It seemed he had forgotten all about him. Bixby wasn’t sure whether to be relieved by the fact that he must not then be the source of his suffering or saddened by the fact that he had been forgotten so easily.

“You shouldn’t be sorry,” he said at last. “I’m the one who’s sorry.”

Then he turned his face away. His shoulders shook more a bit as he took deep, shuddering breaths. Bixby ventured over and sat on the edge of the bed. Then he waited.

“I hope you didn’t go through a lot of trouble,” Endeavour said, finally, his voice strained and miserable.

“Well,” Bixby said—because what was the point of keeping it from him? He always found out the truth of things anyway—“I did have some opera tickets.”

“Oh,” Endeavour said. “I’m sorry.”

“Quite all right, old man. Let’s just call it even, hmmmmm?”

“How are we even?” he asked, confused.

“I didn’t end up having to sit through the damn thing.”

Endeavour snorted a soft, tear-stained laugh.

It would all be all right, Bixby thought. It was just one little glitch.

 

They’d be alright.

 

After all, it wasn’t as if Endeavour wasn’t making a life for himself. About once every other month he went to Paris to meet with his publisher, although Bixby could tell by the timing that he must make it his habit to simply drive straight there and then come right back.

When his publishers presented him with an itinerary of book signings and readings across Britain, he absolutely refused to go—until Bixby “realized” he had a few meetings he should attend in those cities anyway and offered to go along.

At the readings, it was true, Endeavour seemed always a bit ready to fly the scene at the least provocation, but at the signings, where all that was required of him was to sit at a table and chat with people one on one, he seemed to do fine.  


He had made himself right at home in the village. The cook, Madame Zumofen, who came up to the house every day from the village below, seemed to dote on him, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he tutored her two grandchildren.

Sometimes, he strolled down to the library and worked there. He had befriended the librarian, a young woman named Sophie, who harbored ambitions to be a poet, and he was the only one patient enough to sit with Monsieur Malle, who was writing an extensive (many thought rather too extensive) history of the area. (Most people tended to duck into doorways when the saw him coming, so that they might be spared a lecture about the politics of the town during the eighteenth century.)

Twice, Endeavour had ended up as an usher at the weddings of couples that Bixby had never even met.

At a few weddings and parties, when it was dark and everyone seemed too drunk to care, they had even danced together, under the stars—something they never would have dared to do back home.

But as an internationally-recognized poet settled in a small village in France, Endeavour had almost become next door to the town’s patron saint. It seemed any number of eccentricities would not only be tolerated, but even expected.

It was intoxicating, really. Sometimes it seemed as if he could get away murder.

******

Bixby takes the turn off the A33 and heads toward home. He wonders again if Endeavour will like the painting.  He thinks he will.

He thinks he is beginning to understand him.

Or maybe he isn’t.

Because sometimes Bixby can’t shake the feeling that on his birthday, on the day he lay sobbing, face down in the pillows, Endeavour wasn’t crying out of fear or sorrow, but out of relief.

Was it normal for someone to spend their life within a five-mile radius from home?

 It was almost as if he never left the lake house.

And if that’s so, is Bixby really helping him by providing the safe haven of a country estate in Lorraine? Or should he be encouraging him more, insisting that he spread his wings a bit?

Or is he afraid to do that?

When Endeavour discovers he no longer needs him, will he still want him?

 

****************************************************

Endeavour wishes that Joss wouldn’t look at him like that.

Because he’s never been happier.

The years he lived as Detective Constable Morse are like a dream now. He could no longer even begin to understand what it was that drove DC Morse to run and run and run. He ran over rooftops and through the stacks in libraries and crashed through floors and what good did it do? Evelyn Balfour died. Little Maude died. He took on the Masons, but why? Frieda Yellen was already dead. He couldn’t save her, couldn’t rewrite fate. Instead, his actions led only to death and death and just more death.

When they took Val Todd away, he said, “All this fuss about a little nobody from nowhere.” How dared he to say that? It had made DC Morse sick to think that, even now, his crimes exposed, this man, vile, loathsome beyond words, held himself in such high regard that he would speak so of a young girl mourned by her stepfather with a grief that went beyond bearing.

“Take what you want,” Mr. Yellen had said, as he and Thursday searched the girl’s room, in a tone that said: “What does it matter? Everything I loved has been taken from me already, anyway.”

DC Morse looked at the shell of the old man and felt his heart break.

And yet Val Todd scoffed at this love as if it were nothing, scoffed at a girl dead before she had the chance to live as nothing.  

But the worst thing about Val Todd was that, in the end, he was right.

_You really don’t have a clue, do you?_

_You cross these people, they’ll destroy everything you hold dear._

And it transpires, the things you didn’t hold dear enough.

But what did DC Morse care? He was invincible. He ran and ran until he ran to Blenheim Vale, where Thursday lay dying on the floor and a young woman ended her suffering and her life just feet away with him with one shot to the head.

Detective Constable Morse thought he had all the answers. That he could sit at a desk and click a pen and scribble in a notebook and save the world and right the wrongs. Detective Constable Morse would save them all or die trying.

How brave. How pure.

How arrogant. How naïve. 

So so so so, Oh, God, so stupid.

Even during his first days in prison, the man wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t back down.

“You can’t do this!” he had yelled.

Ridiculous.

Obviously, they could and they had.

Detective Constable Morse was good at making demands, shouting in his indignation. Pagan learned to keep quiet, to keep his eyes down.

Detective Constable Morse was good at starting things that Pagan didn’t know how to finish.

By the time Kay and Tony came to collect Pagan, he had come to half-hate DC Morse for misleading him so badly, for leading him into hell.

As he was escorted from his cell for the last time, Pagan took one look back at the man, crumpled there on the floor. For one wild moment, Pagan felt that if he had a gun in his hand, he could have shot him—whether out of rage or to put him out of his misery, he wasn’t sure.

But the man’s eyes were closed as he sat, slumped there in the corner. He might possibly be dead already.

There wouldn’t be any point.

“Come on Morse, we haven’t got all day.”

Pagan blinked in surprise.

“Christ, he’s completely lost the run of himself.”

Pagan turned and left.

He was glad to be rid of Morse.

But sometimes, at the lake house, Pagan worried that the man hadn’t died after all—that after all this time, he still had a pulse—and as badly as the man had deceived him, it seemed cruel beyond words to just leave him there.

 During the day, he sought the solitude of the woods, at night the numbness found in the electric lights and throbbing music of Bixby’s and Bruce’s parties. And always he sought escape in bottle after bottle of Scotch, trying to drown the memory of DC Morse, to purge him from his system.

But nothing Pagan tried worked. He could feel DC Morse’s presence when he least expected it—in every surge of anger he felt when confronted by the arrogance of all the Val Todds of the world—and there were so many of them—drinking and red-faced and self-satisfied at Bixby’s parties.

When a gunshot had rung out at the last party, his first instinct was to head straight to the source of danger, in lockstep with Thursday, just as if, after all this time, he was DC Morse after all.

Not surprising, maybe. Everything that Pagan had tried ended in failure.

And, in retrospect, what could be expected of Pagan? In love for years with a woman who quite possibly helped to tear apart some poor man limb from limb?

Endeavour couldn’t think about that.

It was like something out of a nightmare, the aftermath of the last party in Oxfordshire—both his worlds crashing together in a swirl of confusion. Dr. DeBryn solemnly kneeling by Henry’s body, Strange talking with Kay in the corner. Pagan was sitting in a group of chairs with Bixby, Pippa and a sobbing Susan, when someone was suddenly standing in front of him, wiping roughly at his face. He looked up.

“Christ,” Jakes said. “Even at a party you get into a situation, don’t you?”  

Suddenly, Pagan wanted to tell Jakes that he was sorry about what had happened at the gala. That he understood now that what Jakes had said to him on the terrace wasn’t all that different from what Morse had said to him that night at the pub.  But he couldn’t seem to get his words out properly.

The only thing he managed to say was, “I knew that Henry wouldn’t kill me. He said once I was his onion.”

Now why did he say that? It sounded like utter nonsense, he knew. The only thing it accomplished was to make Jakes raise an eyebrow, Bixby look alarmed and Susan, the only one who must have understood, sob all the harder.

Once the police had cleared the scene, the weak light of dawn had already begun to glimmer through the cracks in the trees. Somehow, he found himself by Bixby’s side out in front of the house.

“How did he know about that? Henry?” Bixby asked. “How did he know about France?”

Pagan shrugged. “I told Tony I might go,” he said.

“And will you?” Bixby asked.

“No,” Pagan said simply. He turned and set off away from the house, alone through the trees.

On his way back to the lake house, Pagan listened for footsteps behind him, wondering if Bixby might follow him, try to argue. He knew the sound of his footsteps well, could recognize them from far, far off.

All was as quiet as the watercolor blue of the dawn.

Once Endeavour got back to the lake house, he found everything was much easier than he thought. He had acquired too much to carry, but he still didn’t have much. All he needed to do was to put one thing in a suitcase, and then another, and then another—that’s all it took.

Endeavour loaded his record player, his typewriter, a box of records and two suitcases into the back of his Jag. As he closed the wooden door behind him, he looked back one last time.

By the time Endeavour left the lake house, he half-hated Pagan. How was he different from DC Morse, really? The only thing either of them seemed to have a talent for was making their lives hell. Always living in darkness, unable to tell what was true from what was not, always finding the worst in people and always desperately, desperately wishing it wasn’t so.

Endeavour started the Jag and drove out to the main road. At the end of the road, he turned up to Bixby’s, and soon, he was pulling the car around to the front of Bixby’s drive. By then, the sun had risen over the top of the trees, brightening and deepening the sky until it had no horizon.

He found Bixby in his study, thumbing through a stack of papers. When he saw Endeavour in the doorway, he froze for a moment, remaining absolutely still, the way someone might sit in a garden so as not to startle a bird.

“I’m ready to go,” Endeavour said.

Bixby just smiled, as if he knew he’d be coming all along.

**********

And what was wrong with his life now, as it was? Never had he ever felt so surrounded by love. He loved Madame Zumofen’s grandchildren, whom he tutored twice a week. Loved to see their faces light up when they understood something, loved to see the pride there when he praised them for a job well done. And he loved Madame Zumofen herself, who made him ridiculous hats that he wore anyway.

He loved their village and Sophie and her youth and her pockets full of scraps of poems and Monsieur Malle, so lonely, he rambled for hours, but what was it to Endeavour to stop for a while and listen? It cost him nothing and seemed to make the old man so happy, if only for a little while.

One day he was out walking and he saw old Monsieur Bonoit, bent and unsteady, climbing a ladder to pick pears from the trees in his garden.

“Let me,” he had said. And, as the old man held the ladder for him, Endeavour felt a lightness he hadn’t for years, perched up in tree after tree, the sun golden on his back, the green pears ripe and heavy in his hand as he placed them in the basket one by one.

The basket was old and rough and scratched his hands a little, but that felt like love, too, just to be able to feel something.

And then Monsieur Bonoit crinkled a smile of gratitude—and in one exchange he felt a love greater than he had felt during years of living with his father.

And then of course there was Bixby, whom he loved most of all. Who was warm and polished and who made light of things when he was happy and made light of things when he was troubled and who made light.

_When you live in the shadows long enough, you forget the light._

Sometimes, when Bixby was out of town, he’d haul his typewriter from his own study into Bixby’s. He never told him he did this, as he feared Bixby might read something more into it than there was.

Bixby was willing to tolerate any amount of irrationality, it seemed, as long as it occurred outside the house. Anything he did that seemed odd in the house, Endeavour realized, invariably made him furrow his brow in concern.

“Don’t you like it here?” “Aren’t you happy here?”

So it was best not let him know.

But it was a comfort to sit in the chair he sat in and to look out the window where he looked out. The room always held a trace of his aftershave, one too strong for most people but that Bixby could, like most things, manage to pull off.

In the study, he could feel his presence almost as clearly as he could at night when Bixby held him and eased himself inside him, filling him with a warmth and love he never thought he’d have. Not someone like him.

_What we call beauty, we quiver before it._

But not in terror.

We tremble with love.

So why shouldn’t this be enough?  Why should he feel the need to apologize?

Bixby certainly didn’t seem to expect him to hurl himself into the path of madmen and serial killers and sinister old men with connections and power and the will to use them. And yet he still seemed to feel he was worth something.

But why, Endeavour couldn’t say.

Because during that week he and Bixby had returned to Oxford, when he had been awarded the honorary degree from Lonsdale and they’d had tea with the Thursdays, he had felt sick, eaten alive by guilt of what he had done.

 It was he who had left DC Morse there, slumped on the floor of his cell, he who had left Pagan wandering alone in the woods.

He was seized with the wild idea that he should go to the prison, go to the lake house, that he should find them. He was the only one who knew they were still there; he was the only one who could save them.

A few times, he had almost said it out loud. But, thank God, he had sense enough to stop himself.

He hates it when Joss looks at him like that.

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with this :0)  
> I hope Chapter 1 wasn't too slow--I sort of needed an interval to set a few things up before wreaking havoc with their lives again. ..  
> Chapter 2 will now pick up right where the epilogue of After the Bacchanal ended . . . and drama and misunderstandings will ensue . . .  
> Thanks for reading!

 

March 1970

 

 

“Blue,” Bixby thinks. “It must be Wednesday.”

Bixby had been bewildered when Endeavour first began hanging out his suits for him, complete with a different color tie for each day of the week.

It took him quite a while to realize that Endeavour thought he was doing him a favor.

When Endeavour had first seen Bixby’s closet, which was about the same size as his previous home on the lake, he had whispered, “Oh my God.”

Bixby had thought he was impressed; now he realizes that he had been horrified.

To Endeavour, who would happily go about in one of two suits every day, or—better yet—a half-zip jumper with a white shirt and matching tie—choosing something to wear was a task, not a luxury. A task he must have decided he would help poor, overwhelmed Bixby to avoid.

Bixby laughs at the thought as he heads downstairs to take a look at his appointment book.

On his way to his study, Bixby finds himself wondering about the Thursdays’ upcoming visit in April. He wonders about how Endeavour will manage, having guests from his old life here. He certainly hopes he’ll be a bit cheerier than he had been the last time they’d seen them, at any rate.

It was Bixby who had persuaded him to go back to Oxford and accept the honorary degree from Lonsdale. It only made sense—the man had worked on the thing for nearly three years; didn’t he want to finish what he started, to check that box?

“Not really.”

This made no sense to Bixby. That was not how life worked. You set a goal, you consider your options, you move forward. You come to an obstacle, you either step over it, or you wait for it to be removed from your path.

You blow on the dice. You win.

You would think that he’d be delighted to return to his hometown in triumph. Instead, he acted as if accepting accolades was some unimaginable form of torture.

When Bixby told him this, Endeavour said, “I don’t understand why you’re angry with me. I’m here. I’m doing what you wanted.”

Bixby sighed. “I don’t want you to do it for me,” he said. “That’s just the point: I want you to do it for you.”

Endeavour laughed at that. “But I told you, I don’t care about that.”

“You should care.”

“But why? So I can say I’m an _Oxford man_?”

He dripped heavy sarcasm over the last two words, as if such a label were cause for disdain.

“Yes, so you can say you’re an Oxford man.”

“But what does that matter?”  

Bixby scowled.

“It just does.”

“All right,” Endeavour said, with an accepting sigh, as if it were he, Bixby, who was being difficult, as if he were the one in need of humoring.

And then, at the Thursdays’, he barely managed to string five words together. It seemed incredible to Bixby that the same man who could break out into a ten-minute lecture on some chap called Plotinus upon seeing a rock in a ruddy brook, could be suddenly rendered incapable of saying anything other than, “Thank you, Mrs. Thursday.”

He had acted like such a misery that Bixby began to fear that Inspector Thursday might call him out to the back garden for a little “chat.”

What are you doing? Playing the horses? Got some bit on the side, have you?

What a nightmare.

Bixby knows that worrying about appearances is on the list of things that Endeavour couldn’t care less about, but Bixby can’t help it. He does care about appearances.

And he certainly hopes Endeavour will help fill in the conversation a little better than he had on their previous visit, that he’ll be sure to smooth things over. . .

Because, after all, there were the more practical concerns. . .

On the day Inspector Thursday had brought Corcoran’s letter to the lake house, Bixby thought they were sunk. But in the aftermath of the scene caused by the letter, the oddness of Bixby being at the lake house passed—miraculously— unnoticed.

And then, the Thursdays had seemed to accept them when they visited their house for tea.  But coming to stay for two weeks at their house was another matter; it revealed a level of comfort with their relationship that Bixby wouldn’t imagine most couples of their age would have. Was Endeavour quite sure everything would be all right?

Endeavour scoffed at that. “They don’t think about anything like that,” he had said.

At one point, he had even posited the highly unlikely theory that they were completely oblivious to the situation.

Bixby had rolled his eyes at this. So what then? They were just good friends? Oh, of course. Because, after all, they just had so much in common.

But then, he’d heard Endeavour speak of the Thursdays enough to know that he regarded them almost as surrogate parents, and children forget that their parents were ever once young.

Goodness, he probably thought that when the stars lined up just right, when Inspector Thursday was off duty and Joan and Sam safely out of the house and off with friends, that the Inspector and Mrs. Thursday just sat on the sofa and held hands while they watched the telly. 

Bixby huffs a laugh to himself; it amazes him sometimes how someone as clever as Endeavour can still manage to be so frightfully obtuse.

But when he looks down at the desk, his smile fades.

Endeavour has left his second royalty cheque there, tossed among his papers.

And it’s . . . well.

Well.

Maybe there is something to this poetry business after all.

Whoever would have imagined that?

****

His advance cheque and his first royalty cheque were paltry sums in the grand scheme of things. Bixby had done as Endeavour had asked—he’d cashed the cheques for him and given him the money. At which point Endeavour went out and bought ridiculous Christmas presents for him and for a few people back home and . . . and God knew what he did with the rest. If Bixby went upstairs right now, he’d probably find the rest shoved under the mattress, for Christ’s sake.

He shudders at the thought. Well, Bixby was putting his foot down. There was no way he was cashing a cheque for that amount.

And maybe he could afford to push the envelope.

After all, he’s negotiating from a stronger position now, isn’t he? He remembers what Endeavour had said to him the other morning.

“ _But Joss?”_

_“Yes?”_

_“You do know that I wouldn’t leave, don’t you?”_

_Bixby was so surprised by the sudden directness of the question, he wasn’t sure what to say._

_“No. No, I suppose I don’t.” he said._

_“Oh,” he said, “I’m sorry for that.”_

_Bixby smiled. “It’s all right,” he said. “See you tonight, then?” And this time it was the casual parting he meant it to be, not an entreaty._

_Endeavour nodded solemnly. “Yes,” he said, his brow still furrowed_.

Maybe he’s been worrying all this time for nothing. Maybe it _was_ time for him to make a few sensible demands of his own.

Or, at least, it was definitely time to try.

************

When Bixby arrives home that evening, the first thing he hears is a soaring aria coming from the drawing room. He walks down the hall and stops in the doorway. Endeavour is there, lying on the carpet, his arms stretched out over his head. Bixby walks over and settles on the couch nearby.

“Endeavour,” he says, his voice coming out slightly louder than he meant, but he’s competing with quite a bit of racket, after all. “I have to talk with you about something.”

“Hmmmmmmm?”

“What’s this?” Bixby asks, handing him the cheque.  

Endeavour reaches up, takes it from his hand. “Um, it’s a cheque. Turner sent it.”

“I know it’s a cheque. But why did you leave it on my desk?”

Endeavour shrugs. “I thought you could deposit it.”

 “Alright,” Bixby says. “We had better go into Paris sometime next week, get you set up with an account. We can stay for dinner, get a hotel, make a night of it.”

“No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Bixby says with a smile.  He’ll change tactics; make a joke of it. “You’re a professional writer now. You can afford to buy me dinner, certainly. You needn’t be that much of a tightwad.”

Endeavour looks confused, as if he can’t tell if Bixby is being serious or not. “I’ll take you to dinner if you want to go,” he says. “I just meant. . . I meant . . . I don’t want an account. You must already have ten accounts, surely? Can’t I simply sign it over to you?”

Bixby laughs. “I don’t want to take your money.”

“Why ever not? I live here, don’t I? Why don’t you simply put it in whatever account you use to pay the mortgage?”

Bixby has to refrain from rolling his eyes. Does the man honestly think he’s paying a mortgage on this place? Writing out monthly cheques to a turf accountant as if this were a row house in Iffey?

Bixby almost wants to laugh, but there was something more serious here.

“But Endeavour, you really should get your own accounts. Larger than life I may be,” he smiles here as if to keep it light. “But you must know I’m not immortal. If something were to happen to me, you would not even be able to access your own money. What would you do then?”

“I don’t know why you’re talking about this,” Endeavour says.

“No, it’s important. What would you do?”

Endeavour shrugs one bony shoulder. “Tony’s parents never really use that lake house,” he says.

Bixby sighs, rubs the bridge of his nose. On the one hand, he can’t say he isn’t flattered by the trusting way in which Endeavour is ready to sign over his earnings, but the idea that if he died, he would simply go back to the lake house as if the past two and a half years hadn’t happened is depressing beyond belief.

“I don’t like that idea,” Bixby says.

Endeavour raises his eyebrows, his forehead rippling into furrows, his eyes widening in question. It’s that odd face he makes whenever a wiseacre comment is coming on—giving him the brow of an old man and the eyes of a child.

“I can’t see how that’s pertinent,” he says. “In your hypothetical world, you’re dead, so I don’t see how as it would matter to you either way.”

“It would matter. If you were to just hole up in that lake house, I’d come back and haunt you until you got your arse out of there.”

Endeavour’s face clouds at this. “Stop that,” he says. “I don’t know why . . .  I don’t know why we’re even discussing this.”

Bixby pauses. “I’m simply trying to understand why you are so opposed to the idea.”

“I’m not opposed to it; it just seems redundant.”

“It’s not redundant,” Bixby says. “Just because we aren’t getting arrested doesn’t mean we’re . . . doesn’t mean we have any legal relationship.”

Endeavour’s face clouds further at this. He gazes up at the ceiling, as if he’s tuning him out, as if he’s listening only to his record now.

“So that’s why you need your own accounts,” Bixby persists. He pauses. “It’s not going to Paris you are opposed to?”

Endeavour laughs. “Of course not. I go there all the time.”

Now that’s a bit of a stretch, but . . .

“Well, then I just don’t understand. All it takes is filling out a few forms. You won Great Britain’s National Award for Poetry, for God’s sake, how hard can it be for you to fill out your name and your . . .”

Ah.  Is that it?

Bixby considers him for a long while. He’s still staring at the ceiling, listening as the record plays. Then Bixby holds out his hand.

“What?”

“Give me the cheque.”

Endeavour immediately begins to hand it back.

“Sign the back first.”

Endeavour rolls up off the carpet. “I haven’t got a pen.”

Bixby pulls one out of the inside of his jacket. Endeavour rolls back over and signs his name against a cardboard album cover.

Well, that’s a casual way to treat such a sum, Bixby thinks.

Next time he’s up in Paris, Bixby will stop by his lawyer’s office. It shouldn’t be too difficult to have Endeavour made a silent partner in some of his ventures. Not all of them, of course. That might be overwhelming. Endeavour didn’t need that many extra snowflakes swirling around in there, after all.

Just three of four of the more straightforward concerns. Just those that have always been –mmmm—completely above-board and legitimate. The last thing he would need would be any legal trouble.

Bixby studies the signature on the back for a brief moment before tucking the cheque into his pocket.

He called himself Endeavour now, but when he signed his name, all he could still bring himself to write was an E.

E. Morse. 

Six letters.

Didn’t look too hard to copy, really.

************************

****

There’s something about records that’s even better than the music recorded on them.

It’s the spaces between the songs.

On every record, there are rings of grooves with absolutely nothing recorded on them—there’s only the slightest edge of static between one song and the next, clearly demarking the exact point of endings and beginnings.

Endeavour is glad that the Thursdays are coming to visit. But he’s apprehensive, too.

It feels a bit like having two songs play at once. Or, even worse, three. Completely discordant.

Actually, it’s odd to think, that of all the people Endeavour has known in his life, Inspector Thursday is the only one who has known all three of them. All three of him. Of them.

Endeavour stops typing.

Wait.

That doesn’t sound right.

He stares down at the keys for a moment, hesitates. He looks at the paper.

It’s all just gibberish.

What he needs is a change of scene, a fresh start.

He decides to haul his typewriter into Joss’ study. He won’t be back till four. He need never know.

Once he’s sitting in Joss’ chair, he cranks in a piece of paper, types. But those three songs all start again at once, all begin playing in his head. Rubbish. He cranks the paper out, balls it up, tosses it away.

There’s something lovely about the way a paper ball sails across the room. Sails and arcs and then falls with a soft hush to the ground. But then the paper looks so forlorn sitting there, crumpled and abandoned on the floor. Right when he’s already reaching for a fresh piece and moving on . . .

It’s like Auden said—Everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster. . . and even the delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky . . . had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

 

The poor thing. Maybe it wasn’t rubbish. Maybe he should read it again.

He goes over to the window to pick the paper up, and notices something strange—a solid wall of canvas stuck behind the bookcase.

He slides it out. He looks at it for a moment.  

And.

And it can’t be true.

But it is.

It’s the stolen Caravaggio . . . and it’s right in front of him. It’s the painting that was stolen last October from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo in Sicily and it’s been rumored that the Sicilian mafia is involved. The Italian police have created a special commission to investigate and there are groups in every country working on the case, agents from DCPJ in France and from Scotland Yard in Britain and from the FBI in the States. And when they find the thieves they’ll arrest them and Endeavour Morse, I’m arresting you for  . . . and then  . . . and then . . .

 

And then the next thing that Endeavour knows is that he’s in the woods. And he’s running. He feels almost otherworldly, like he’s beyond gravity, like he’s flying. The wind is in his hair and he’s free and how can he do this to me. How can he do this to me and he’ll never go back he’ll run and run. He can keep up this pace for ever. He’ll go and he’ll never come back and they’ll never find him. And the trees fly past and he’ll outrun them all. He’ll fly over fallen branches like he’s weightless and he is weightless. He can fly into the very air if he chooses, completely disappear.

And then, in one corner of his mind, a new realization glimmers.

Pagan has done this before.

And as that thought forms, his legs lose their grace. He trips over a fallen branch and flies to the ground, sprawled out in the mud and leaves.

*******

Pagan loved Tony’s aunt’s house out in the country. There were woods and a lake with a rowboat and a conservatory that was painted bright yellow. There, they became almost like children again.

Well, children who drank a lot, that is.

The first time they had brought Pagan there, he was amazed, not only by the house itself, but by the realization that they were trying to show it off a bit, to impress him. Almost as if they were courting him, when, in fact, he was dumbfounded as to why he had been invited in the first place.

The invitation itself had been an utter surprise. It was a Friday night, and he had been at a get-together in one of his classmate’s rooms—the place was small and so it was crowded—when suddenly he felt a brush against his back. He thought it must be someone trying to get through, and so he ignored it. Then it came again, someone tapping him on his shoulder. He turned.

It was Susan.

“Do you want to come with us to the country?”

“What?” Pagan asked.

“We’re leaving now—Henry and Pippa and me—we’re driving up to Tony’s aunt’s place for the weekend. The others are already there. Do you want to come?”

If he had been thinking more clearly, he could have thought of any number of objections. He had known them for only a week or so, for one thing. He hadn’t any sort of packed bag with him, for another.

But, instead, he said, “Alright,” and followed her out to the car.

He had never ridden in a convertible before. It felt like freedom itself, feeling the wind on his face and flying through his hair, sitting in the back next to the girl who had taken his breath away the first time he saw her.

The house was like something out of a fairy-tale. It was bizarre to think that he, a nobody from nowhere, should be invited here as a guest.

It was Susan, Henry and Bunny who had shown him the conservatory—high-ceilinged with a grand piano. Susan set her drink on top of the piano and sat down on the bench, sending her slender hands rippling up and down the keys, making a sound like rainfall. Just a jazzy little riff, like one Pagan imagined one might hear in a 1920s nightclub.

 She scooted over on the bench, and gestured for Pagan to sit next to her.

He sat down. As she looked at him, he began to have the uncomfortable feeling of being scrutinized. “Why don’t you play something?” Pagan said, for something to say.

“Of course, she can’t _really_ play anything,” Henry said.

Susan looked up at this, as if accepting a challenge, and began playing Rhapsody in Blue. It was a bit inaccurately done, but it sounded nice enough.

She paused and took a sip of her drink. It looked like ginger ale. Then she handed it to Pagan.

“Here, have a sip,” she said.

He took it and drank and then wrinkled his nose. It tasted like turpentine.

“I heard you sing with TOSCA,” Susan said.

Pagan was surprised at this. He hadn’t thought he was anyone one heard anything about.

“Yes,” Pagan said.

“Why don’t you sing something?” she said. “I’ll see if I can play it.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

“You won’t sing, then? You’re not embarrassed to, are you? Or is it that you aren’t very good?”

Pagan shrugged.

“Just you wait,” she said, rippling her fingers over the keys. “I’ll get you to sing for me before long.” She said it in a funny sort of way, as if she was talking about something else.

“No,” Pagan said, hating at how his accent came out even on that simple word.  “I’m not much of a soloist, I’m afraid.”

She and Bunny laughed, but Pagan couldn’t fathom why.

“Well,” Susan said, “I wouldn’t have thought you would need to be. But I’ll make a note to keep that in mind.”

Bunny snorted.

“Maybe you’d like to sing something, Bunny?” Susan said. “I heard that you’re quite the soloist. Or at least that’s what Marion tells me.”

Bunny looked unamused by this. “Ha, ha, my girl,” he said.

***

Pagan and Kay were walking along the edge of the lake.

“It’s odd, isn’t it?” Pagan said. “Everything they say, it’s like. . . they’re really saying something quite different.”

“Yes,” Kay said. “That’s certainly true. I would have thought the upper classes would have had a little more class, wouldn’t you?” 

Pagan shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just their way, I suppose.”

******

In the basement of the house was a full-sized, old-fashioned sleigh, like something straight out of an illustration in a nineteenth-century book of Christmas carols.

One night, they all piled in it, as if they were setting off through snow-covered country side.

“Better let Pagan have the reigns,” Bunny said. “He’s the only one not drunk enough to steer us into a tree.”

*****

In the mornings, when all was quiet, Pagan would go out to the porch and sit in the swing, watching the world come slowly to life. Everyone else was generally still asleep—hungover—except for Henry, who was an incurable insomniac. He would come out every morning and sit at a small table at the other side of the porch, writing something in a notebook.

“What are you doing?” Pagan asked.

Henry looked up. “Translating Paradise Lost into Latin.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious to see what I’ll end up with.”

Pagan hummed noncommittally. Henry was always doing things like that. It had taken Pagan a while before he realized that to Henry, such projects were just like his crosswords, just something to pass the time.

Pagan looked up. A pair of finches had built a nest in the eaves of the porch. It was touching, the way the male darted about, giving Pagan a wide berth as he hopped from spot to spot, bringing tidbits to his mate, facing danger in the name of love.

****

His favorite thing about the house, though, was the little lake and the rowboat. Sometimes, when he was back in his room in Oxford and couldn’t sleep, he would close his eyes and pretend he was there, rocking softly with the current, looking up into the trees.

****

But on the night of the last bacchanal, that dream world seemed to pop like a soap bubble. And Pagan had run then, the way Endeavour had run now. He had felt almost as if he were no longer human, almost as if he were a deer, the way he had leapt over logs and over roots and across brooks filled with stones as if they were nothing.

He didn’t know what he was running from—whether it was from some primal fear or from the otherworldly shrieks that he had heard in the darkness, or from the god he imagined he saw, one with blood-shot eyes and a wine-stained mouth. All he knew was running.

All he was was running.

He woke in a world of fragrant green. He sat up. He was lying in a field of tall grass; the sun shone painfully in his eyes. He blinked, confused for a moment, and then it all came rushing back. He tried to stand, but his legs felt wobbly beneath him, as if he weren’t used to having only two of them.

He started walking, but soon he heard the rumble of distant traffic. He was going the wrong way, back to the main road. He looked up and considered the sun. It felt warm and consoling on his face. It brought all his senses back to him.

What was he doing out here? He looked down and realized he was still wearing the chiton Susan had made—really just a ripped bedsheet tied at the shoulder. His bare arms and bare feet were scratched and bloodied. If someone were to see him like this, they’d think him mad.

But there was no need to panic. He’d simply start walking. Soon he’d be back home, and he’d say nothing about this at all, lest the others think he had lost his mind. God only knows what was in that smoke. He must have simply imagined the whole thing.

But when he found Pippa, he wasn’t so sure.

She was alone, sitting on a rock by a brook, her hands covering her face, crying softly. He walked up quietly, sat down beside her.

“Pippa?”

She looked up with a start. Then she threw her arms around his neck, and began sobbing all the harder. It was awful. Pagan didn’t know what to say.

He patted her clumsily on the back.

“It will be alright,” he said. “I got lost, too.”

“Did you see?” she said. “Did you see?”

“See what?”

But she would only shake her head.

“Pippa, it’s alright, I found the road, so that means Tony’s aunt’s house must be that way,” he nodded his head to the right. Smiled a smile meant to encourage, meant to suggest that everything was perfectly normal, perfectly fine.

He reached to gently take her arm, to help her to her feet, to guide her, but, suddenly, as she stood, she seemed to lurch to life. She grabbed his arm in both her hands and began trying to pull him in the opposite direction.

“Let’s not go, Pagan. Let’s go to the road and see if we can get a ride. Let’s just go back to Oxford.”

“What?” Pagan said.

“Let’s go out to the road.”

“But we can’t, Pippa, look at us,” he said, gesturing to their homemade chitons. “And besides, they’ll be waiting for us.”

“Pagan, don’t leave me here.”

“Of course, I won’t.”

“Then come with me. Don’t go back there,” she said.

“But why?”

“Because I don’t want you to.”

“But why? Pippa, they’ll be waiting for us.”

But who Pagan meant by _they_ was _she_.

What he meant was, Susan will be waiting for me.

And he didn’t stop to ask why Pippa, who was quick to laugh and who drove more recklessly than anyone who he had ever known, who leapt high fences on horseback and leaped into lakes in March, would suddenly seem so terrified, did he?

No, he didn’t ask. He just went straight back. He didn’t ask questions. He just went home.

Because he loved Susan.

********

The sky overhead is heavy and gray, the branches black and crisp and bare reaching up above him. A raven caws in the distance, its call echoing through the empty trees. The most forlorn sound. The loneliest, loneliest sound.

It would be hard to go back to being all alone.

Endeavour stands up and brushes off his knees.

And he’s doing the same now thing that Pagan did then.

And he knows that he’s following right in Pagan’s footsteps, but he can’t help it.

Because he loves Bixby.

And Bixby’s nothing like Susan. Not really.

Is he?

Maybe they hadn’t been honest with one another. It was clear Bixby was disappointed with him. Disappointed that he wasn’t, well, that he wasn’t . . . But he had hardly lied. When they met, he had been unemployed for months, living in a one-room shack and drinking until he passed out on a daily basis. He could hardly be accused of false advertising.

And he knew what Bixby was. Had not DC Morse seen enough of how wealthy and powerful men built their empires?

It was just a painting. Bixby would sell it and that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t as if he’d do anything cruel. Anything to hurt anyone.

And he had hidden it from him, hadn’t he? He hadn’t asked his opinion of it. Hadn’t involved him at all in the whole affair. Bixby wouldn’t do anything so that he’d end up . . . that he’d end up. . .

Would he?

Endeavour hesitates. For a moment he feels it again, the urge to run. But then he stops.

And walks slowly home.

He’s halfway there, when he remembers that he left the painting pulled out from behind the bookcase, leaning against the window.

He begins again to run, his heart beating in his chest like a caged thing.

He’ll put it back. He’ll hide it and he never saw it.

He never saw it.

He just never saw it.

He runs all the way back to the house and up the steps and down the hall, straight to Bixby’s study. In one deft movement, he slides the painting back into place behind the bookcase. He feels he might almost collapse then and there; he can hardly catch his breath. But that won’t do. . .

He darts out of the study and back down the hall. He’ll go in the drawing room and put on a record and . . .

“What the hell happened to you?”

Endeavour stops in his tracks.

Bixby is just coming through the front door. He’s looking at him in complete bewilderment.

Endeavour looks down at himself. He’s half-covered in mud. He tries to say something, but his heart is hammering and his lungs are burning; he still hasn’t managed to catch his breath.

Bixby steps closer and reaches forward as if to pull something from his hair, but Endeavour flinches.

Bixby jerks back, looking stunned.

“I’ll go . . . I’ll just go get cleaned up,” Endeavour manages finally. He turns away.  

Bixby remains where he stands. But Endeavour can feel his eyes on his back all the way up the stairs.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Bixby stands in the doorway, utterly lost for words. He watches Endeavour as he walks up the steps, his shoulder blades like wings jutting out from the back of his sweat-stained shirt.

He had been steeled for some time for the morning that Endeavour might disappear.

But this. This he just never saw coming.

There have been other times he’s seen Endeavour breathless and mud-stained, after all.

Bixby remembers that long-ago evening on the dock back in Oxfordshire . . . how they had walked into the woods and how he had leaned Pagan against a tree for a kiss. How Pagan had taken his shoulders in his hands and fallen backwards into the leaves, knocking Bixby off balance, pulling him down against him with an urgency that sent Bixby’s heart pounding.

Bixby was fairly certain he could have had him there and then, and in fairly quick time, if he hadn’t displayed such shock at the feel of Pagan’s ribs jutting just beneath his warm skin.

At the time, Pagan’s wide, watching eyes had given Bixby the distinct impression of having been chosen, singled out. As if Pagan, despite being clearly drunk, had been acting with acute deliberation, deciding specifically to place himself under his hands.

But, after all, nobody ever accused Bixby of underestimating himself.

Perhaps he wasn’t so special after all.

Perhaps Endeavour simply made this sort of thing a habit?

If Endeavour did ever consider leaving him for someone else, Bixby would have thought that that would mark their quick and abrupt end; he never would have imagined this scenario: he never would have thought he’d come right back here, disheveled and out of breath, straight from another’s arms.  
****  
At dinner, Endeavour’s face is freshly washed, but he’s pale and subdued. He keeps his eyes cast down, pushes his food around with his fork.

Well, if he has nothing to say, neither does Bixby. Bixby looks down and concentrates on his dinner. But he feels odd, as if he’s being watched.

When Bixby looks up, he’s struck by the wariness in the clear blue eyes watching him from across the table.

When he looks up, he doesn’t see the Endeavour he has come to discover under the veneer of Pagan, the one he’s seen clacking away on his typewriter, perched in the window seat of their suite, the one who’s laughed warmly in his ear as he whirled him about under the stars, the one he’s found out in the garages, tinkering with the engine of his Jag, wiping his forehead on his sleeve, a smear of grease across the bridge of his nose.

When he looks up, he realizes he’s looking at Pagan.

Bixby leaves the table without a word and goes into his study. He has a few calls to make. But as he’s talking, he feels oddly distracted.

And it’s not like him at all. He knows how to keep each item in its own compartment. How to keep a clear head.

Well, enough of this.

He looks for Endeavour in the drawing room, where he can often be found in the evenings, stretched out on the carpet, listening to his records. But the room is dark and empty. He checks his study. He’s nowhere to be found. He can’t have gone up to bed so early, can he?

Bixby finds him upstairs, buried under a nest of covers, a book propped on his lap. He looks utterly done in.

Well, Bixby thinks, hope whoever it was was worth all of that effort.

Then he feels disgusted with himself. Why must he make some tasteless joke to himself right when he feels his heart might break?

  
Sometimes, the only way to win is to pretend you haven’t lost.

Bixby walks over and sits on the edge of the bed. Endeavour doesn’t look up, but his eyes waver, as if he’s considering his next move. He looks secretive as hell. God, he’s got an awful poker face.

“So, are you going to tell me who it is?” Bixby asks.

“What?” Endeavour asks. A flicker of confusion moves across his face, but he doesn’t look up. “Who what is?”

“Who were you with today, out in the woods.”

“Huh? No one.”

“Oh, really?” Bixby drawls.

Endeavour looks utterly lost, and Bixby is already regretting the use of that tone, the sharp, polished tone he uses when he means to let the world know he was pretty far above giving a damn about anything.

Then, understanding hits home. Bixby can see it the minute it happens, and Endeavour’s head snaps up; what bit of color left in his face drains away.

“What? What are you saying? Is that what you think of me?”

“Well, what am I supposed to . . .

“Oh, that’s very . . .

“think? You looked like you’d been rolling all over the ground, you’re completely out of breath . . . it’s not like I knew you that long before you . . .

“Don’t!” Endeavour snaps. “Don’t talk about that. . .”

“. . . Then you’ve been acting cagey all night. You obviously don’t want to talk to me . . .

Endeavour looks down, scowling.

  
Bixby sighs. “For God’s sake, Endeavour, why can’t you just talk to me?”

  
“I was just embarrassed, alright? I don’t . . . I don’t want to talk about it.”

  
“You don’t want to talk about why you look like you’ve been running through the woods like some sort of madman?”

  
Endeavour flinches.

  
Was he getting warmer?

  
“Is that it? What? You were just out running in the woods, then?”

  
Endeavour looks down at his book. “I just saw something . . . and I thought. . . and I didn’t even know how I got there. I don’t . . . I don’t remember going outside. . . I was just running. . . . and I tripped . . . and I realized I was being stupid . . . and I came home. That’s all there is to it. Please, don’t let’s talk about it.”

  
“You saw something. Did something frighten you?”

  
Endeavour slams his book down. “No, nothing _frightened_ me.”

  
Bixby rubs the bridge of is nose. “I’m sorry. But you say you don’t even know how you got there. That’s not. . . .” Bixby stops, runs his hand through his hair, searching for the word.

  
“Say it.”

  
“Endeavour . . .”

  
“No. I know you’re thinking it. So you might as well go ahead and say it.”

  
“Endeavour. . . “

  
“This is just why I didn’t want to talk to you about it.”

  
“But why?”

  
“Because I didn’t want you to look at me like that.”

  
“Like what?”

  
“Like I’m a huge disappointment. I never lied to you, you know. When you met me, you could see for yourself how I lived. What? Did you think you were going to wave your magic wand and make me vice president of sales at your export firm in Marseille? I’m not like that. I’m not like you.”

  
Bixby sighs again. “I never wanted you to be like me.”

  
Endeavour stiffens. Then he shrugs, and when he speaks, his voice is barely above a whisper.

  
“Why not? I do.”

  
Bixby frowns.

  
“I’m sorry I said what I did.”

  
Endeavour shrugs. “I guess I should be flattered.” His lips twitch a bit. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d think there’d be anyone else who would have me.”

  
Bixby doesn’t much like that either, the wary posture the turned in expression. It’s all Pagan.

  
He wants to say: I don’t want you to be like me. He wants to say: I’m proud of you. In many ways, it’s he that’s the larger success now. From what he’s read, his work seems to mean something to people. Makes them feel something. What does Bixby do, after all? Play shell games with companies, buy low, sell high, market his companies, market his brand, market himself. He spends the bulk of his day generating smoke and mirrors. It’s Endeavour whose work seems to be a labour of love.

  
Instead, he picks up one of the fir cones on his bedside table.

  
“What’s this, then?”

“A fir cone.”  
“I can see it’s a fir cone. I suppose of I’ve been wondering why you’re hoarding them with all of these newspapers.”

  
“I don’t really want to say.”

  
Of course, he doesn’t.

  
****  
The next evening, Bixby comes home to the sound of laughter wafting from the drawing room. Endeavour’s there with Madame Zumofen’s grandchildren, Esme and Guillaume. Bixby stops and stands in the doorway. They’re all sitting on the floor around the coffee table, books and papers spread everywhere. Esme says something in Greek, and they all laugh.

  
Bixby had wondered about this before—he never understood what could be so goddamn funny about ancient Greek. Especially to a sixteen and a fourteen-year old. Then, once he began to socialize more in the village, he came to learn that Esme and Guillaume were considered quite the scholars, that Esme was considered a certainty for a scholarship to the Sorbonne. So, it was three little pedants all together then. That explained it.

  
But today, he’s grateful for the sound, for having the place ringing with laughter and the burble of conversation, even if it is in a language he doesn’t understand. Maybe it will help to chase the fog hanging over them from last night.

  
****  
But it’s not to be. Because from then on, it’s like watching a slow- motion film, one of those ones that show a plant bending to the sun, a flower bursting into bloom, as Endeavour gradually unwinds into Pagan.

  
He pushes his food around on his plate, or skips meals all together, disappearing off somewhere, usually out in the woods. As his face grows thinner, his cheekbones sharpen and his eyes look larger. Instead of sitting, absorbed with his journal for hours, he seems to be always in motion.

  
In all this time, Bixby never could get Endeavour to get a proper haircut—he simply trims the ends of his hair himself once in a while. Now, he’s stopped bothering altogether and the ends grow longer and wavier and begin to bleach out into red-gold.

  
He moves more erratically, asks questions that seem out of the blue even for someone whose head is a perpetual snowstorm.

  
****  
One evening, as Bixby’s sitting at his desk, going through some letters, he senses a shadow in the door. It’s Endeavour, looking around the corner of the door frame.

  
“There are some finches building a nest in one of the window boxes out front,” he announces.

 

“Oh,” Bixby said uncertainly. “That’s nice.”

 

But Endeavour looks as if it wasn’t nice.

  
Then the phone rings. It must be the call he’d been expecting from New York. He picks up the phone.

  
“Bixby,” he says.

  
Endeavour lingers in the doorway for a moment, then disappears.

  
It’s much later that he realizes that a year ago, he would have said, “Excuse me for a moment, old man,” and picked up the phone with a flourish, just for a bit of theatre, just to show off a bit, like a peacock spreading his feathers. See how in demand I am?

  
Now he realizes that that night, he had picked up the phone and turned away, as if Endeavour wasn’t even standing there, with some question in his eyes only he could understand.

  
***  
It seems as if Endeavour’s always looking out the front window, but Bixby has no idea why. Then he feels again a surge of jealousy: is someone out there, out in the trees, signaling for him to come out? Bixby takes to looking out the window whenever he passes as well, but he doesn’t see anything at all remarkable. Just a cold March landscape

.  
*****  
A second advance cheque—written to a much larger amount than the first— shows up on his desk one day. He flips it over. It’s already signed on the back.

  
More and more often, when the phone rings, it’s Endeavour’s publisher. He wishes he would call them back, for God’s sake, and settle with them whatever it is they want. It’s starting to tie up the line.

  
The seventh or eighth time the office calls, Bixby grows worried. Has he missed some deadline? They did send him a cheque, and he does seem to be spending a lot of time aimlessly wandering about. It feels like a betrayal—he certainly isn’t the man’s father, for God’s sake—but Bixby can’t help but wonder. He has to ask.

  
“No, no,” Turner says. “We got the manuscript last week. Hutchens is half in love with the thing. We’ve just been trying to set up a time for a photoshoot for the back cover.”

  
“Oh, is that all?” Bixby says. “I’ll pass the message along.”

  
****  
That night, he finds Endeavour stretched out on the carpet of the drawing room, listening to his records. He has one leg drawn up at the knee, the other crossed over it at the ankle, kicking his foot in a rhythm that, strangely enough, even Bixby can see doesn’t match the music.

  
Bixby sits down on the sofa.

  
“I wish to God you’d call Turner back. He’s called me eight times if he’s called once.”

  
Endeavour scowls. “I don’t know why they are harassing me about that. I already told them no. No and no and no and no,” he adds, kicking his foot on each “no.”  
“About what? It sounds like all they want is a photo for the back cover.”

  
“I’m not doing that.”

  
“But why? I quite thought you’d become poetry’s pinup boy, with that. When we were at Oxford and Cambridge, I thought I was going to have to beat off all those arty, eager little undergrads off with a stick.”

  
Endeavour’s face clouds at that. “That picture ruined my life,” he says.

  
Bixby blinks. If Endeavour’s life could indeed be said to have been “ruined,” there were quite a lot of things Bixby would put on the list of causes above having his photo on the back of a book.

  
But Endeavour seems unwilling to offer anything more, and for a long time, Bixby remains silent. Well, nothing ventured . . . He’ll keep it light.

  
“How on earth could a picture have ruined your life?” Bixby asks. “That’s a bit hyperbolic, surely?”

  
Endeavour frowns. He’s still kicking his foot off-beat to his record. “I don’t like people looking at me,” he says.

  
Well, Bixby certainly can’t begin to understand that. Why the hell not? And besides. . .

  
“When we were up in Paris last, quite a few people recognized you and came up to talk, and I thought you handled it all well enough. You can actually be quite awkwardly charming. When you make an effort to be.”

  
“Paris is fine,” Endeavour says. “In Paris, no one wants to seem gauche. They’ll either come up and talk to you right away, or they’ll pretend they don’t recognize you all together, deliberately not look at you.”

  
Bixby is silent, considering this.

  
He’s always been glad to be recognized—that just came with success. It had meant you had arrived.

  
At the last gala they had attended in Paris, he had come into a room and heard a sudden buzzing of whispers. “Do you know who that is?” he overheard a woman say over to his left.

  
Almost against his will, he felt his chest puff up slightly, as it had always done at those moments, when he overheard praise of the persona he had worked so hard to create.

  
“I think that’s Endeavour Morse’s lover.”

  
Bixby had to struggle to retain his cool exterior at that; he could almost have laughed out loud. So, the tides were turning. Well, that was fine.

  
Because did he have it or what? Who else could walk through a house full of drunks, pick the most unpromising one of the lot up off the floor—failed college student, failed policeman, living in a one- room, unheated shack, fresh from prison no less, dust him off, and find he’s got the probable future poet laureate of Britain?

  
Honestly, there were times he amazed even himself.

  
He had told Endeavour about it on the way home, but he didn’t seem to find it at all amusing. Instead, he put on that pinched face he wears whenever he feels that Bixby’s being crass.

  
Is it some posh thing, then? Not wanting to be looked at? Staring is bad manners, he supposes, after all.

  
But before he can hazard a guess, Endeavour continues.

  
“I don’t like that double-take thing people do, when they’re watching but pretending they’re not watching. You might simply be walking along and then you realize, they’re following you all around, watching you out of the corner of their eye. . . like you’re . . . “

  
He breaks off, frowning, kicking his foot a few beats faster out of time.

  
Bixby is reminded suddenly of Endeavour’s birthday, on the morning they went to the Forest of Darney.

  
It had been a warm, glorious day . . . the kind that occurs only in late September, and there had been quite a few people out on the trails.

  
And a few of them did seem to recognize him. Bixby remembers saying so.

  
“You’re becoming quite the celebrity, I think,” he had said.

  
Endeavour’s face clouded at that. “A squirrel can’t even eat an acorn in peace out here,” he had lamented, before they set off further into the woods, taking a less frequented path.

  
Bixby looks at him now, stretched out below, his foot still kicking off-beat to the music. “Is that why you wanted to come home that day, on your birthday? You didn’t like people looking at you?” Bixby asks.

  
Endeavour’s eyes go slightly glassy, his mouth tightens. He says nothing; but the expression on his face is as good as an affirmation.

  
“Maybe I should dye my hair,” he says, at last.

  
“Don’t do that,” Bixby says.

  
“Why not?” he says tartly. “Why should you care if I do?”

  
Bixby huffs a laugh at that. And Endeavour’s the one who is supposed to know about art. Dying that mutable hair would be like taking a hammer to a statue by Michelangelo

“Or maybe I’ll be lucky and go prematurely gray,” he says.

  
“Maybe you should get a giant pair of sunglasses,” Bixby says.

  
Endeavour groans at that. “God, that’s so affected. I honestly think I’d rather be dead.”

  
*****  
Two weeks pass, and the shadow of Pagan remains. He’s always out roaming about whenever his goddamn publisher calls. His hair spirals more and more out of control. Honestly, if he won’t cut it, he might at least run a comb through it now and then.

  
At dinner, Bixby feels increasingly annoyed by his apparent ongoing hunger strike. It feels like the most tremendous slap in the face, watching him sit there, night after night, considering him with those goddamn wary Pagan eyes.

  
And what the hell? Why the hell has he been working all these years to build an empire, an unassailable fortress of security, specifically designed to prevent just this—his loved ones from going hungry—if he’s going to be left with just that anyway?

“Would you eat something, for God’s sake?” he says one night.

  
Endeavour flinches.

  
“I’m fine,” he says. “I’m just thinking.”

  
“You can’t think and eat at the same time? I thought you were considered clever.”

  
“Sometimes I . . . I just can’t eat when people are looking at me.”

  
Bixby's laugh is bitter. “It’s just me here, after all. I didn’t realize I qualified as _people_. Goodness, you say it as if it’s something dreadful.”  
“Just leave off, all right? What’s it to you?” Endeavour snaps.

  
Bixby should remember that look, that of an animal trapped in a corner, but he can’t seem to stop himself.

  
“I’ll tell you what it is to me, Pagan. I’m tired of sitting here and watching this little drama. Now eat something.”

  
Endeavour scowls. “Who are you to order me about?” he says. “What’s it to you, anyway? What? Are you worried that the crops are going to fail?”

  
He says the last with an awful sarcasm and a mocking twist of a southern American accent. Bixby sits stunned, chilled to the bone.

  
“You know what, Pagan? I think you might want to consider giving your old pals a ring.”

  
“What old pals?”

  
“Your dear chums from when you were “up.” See if any of them are missing their soul. What a goddamn heartless thing to say.”

  
Endeavour’s eyes widen. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t know . .. . “

  
“That’s true enough. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  
After all, you’re an _Oxford man_ , he finishes in his head. But he doesn’t say it out loud. Even as the retort forms in his mind, he realizes it’s unfair. Not when he was the one who pushed to make him so.

  
***  
And right when Bixby begins to wonder, as he did that day long ago at the lake house, whether or not he was over his head, Endeavour disappears.

  
It’s three in the morning, and Endeavour’s not there—there’s just a cold, rumpled spot in the bed next to him. He goes out into the sitting room, but he knows he won’t be there—there’s no sound of clacking keys.

  
He goes downstairs, ghosts through all the rooms in the darkness, but he knows in his heart it’s hopeless. After dark, when the cook and the maids have gone home for the day, Endeavour always arranges whatever he’s doing so that he’s only a few rooms away. He never goes on a separate floor by himself.

  
And, as sure as Bixby predicted, he’s nowhere to be found.

  
Bixby walks out to the porch, stands under a sea of stars. It’s not as if he wasn’t expecting this. Especially considering the way things had been going lately.

  
Bixby looks up at the stars. They seem cruel now, those hard, cold points of light, considering that it was less than a year ago that they had seemed to offer their blessing, a promise, leading him to hope for the first time that this story all might end quite differently.

  
It was at a wedding down in the village. The party after ran late into the night. All the prim little tables, so carefully decorated with flowers and favours, had fallen into disarray. The fairly lights swung with the stars, and the bride and groom had long ago left the scene. The musicians were drunk, and though they still sounded fairly all right, they were beginning to hit wrong notes, play more erratically, as if they were each following their own tempo.

  
Bixby was sitting with a glass of Scotch when he felt a warm weight press against his side.

  
It was Endeavour. He’d been drafted somehow as an usher for the affair, and had been on call throughout the night, assigned by the bride’s mother to various tasks, leaving Bixby to sit alone once again, again the benevolent onlooker, the gentleman from up on the hill, just as he had been back at Oxford.

  
But now, with the bride and groom safely off, the harried lady had decided to let the revelers do what they may, abdicated responsibility for the whole affair, leaving Endeavour free to fully join the party.

  
With Endeavour’s weight pressed up against him, all was well. It was like the world had sprung back to life, like he was pulled in from behind a thick curtain, back into the circle, back into the light.

  
Endeavour had leaned over, his breath warm in his ear, and said over the music, “May I have this dance?”

  
Bixby laughed at this. Endeavour had been drinking fairly heavily throughout the night. All the ushers had. Bixby had noted them with some amusement, standing in a circle in identical green ties and cummerbunds, passing around a flask, until the mother of the bride lit into them, scattering them like a child running through a flock of birds, frantic that they had not yet set up enough extra chairs.

  
Dance, indeed, Bixby thought. “You must be mad,” he said.

  
“So they say. But do you want to dance or not?” Endeavour said.

  
“You don’t think that’s going a bit far, old man?”

  
Endeavour snorted. “Look around. Everyone here is three sheets to the wind. I honestly don’t think they would care. And besides, in France, if you’re published, you can get away with just about anything, didn’t you know? People expect, it even—they’re disappointed if you aren’t a little madcap.”

  
“Is that so?” Bixby said.

  
“It is. So c’mon, then” he slurred, pulling him to his feet.

  
Bixby let himself be guided in spite of himself.

  
For someone who moved as gracefully as Endeavour, he was a terrible dancer. All gawky legs and arms moving in all directions. Bixby felt quite jolted about. It was ridiculous—if they were going to look like a pair of idiots, they might as well do it with proper style.

  
He placed a firm hand on the small of Endeavour’s back and tightened his grip on his hand. Bixby was surprised by how quickly he seemed to go limp under his hands, so that he was nearly weightless. As they circled under the stars, Endeavour brought his face up to his ear.

  
“This isn’t so terrible now, is it?”

Bixby hummed noncommittally. He felt a damned fool to be honest.

  
But the expression on Endeavour’s face changed his mind. He was regarding him solemnly, as if he was drawing himself up to say something.

  
This will be the moment, Bixby thought, feeling the blood suddenly hammer in his ears. This will be the moment that he’ll say the words that no one had ever said to him, not once, in all the years he’s waited. He knew somehow from the first that he’d be the one to say them.

  
And sure enough, Endeavour was drawing his face back up to his ear.

  
“I told you,” he said. “On a night like this, a man might believe anything is possible.”

  
Then he dissolved into laughter and fell against him, so that he would have sunk to the ground if Bixby hadn’t had his arm around him, holding him up.  
It wasn’t exactly what he had been hoping to hear.

  
But in that moment, it felt close enough.

  
****  
But now, Bixby feels numb. He almost wishes he was the sort to cry. He might feel quite a bit better if he did.

  
He’s been wearing the mask for so long now, that he realizes: that’s all he is.

  
What he had feared the most when he met Pagan—when he had bought the painting in hopes of starting a conversation with him about art and existence and the moons of Saturn—had come to pass. He had wanted to show Pagan—and himself—that he was more than a winning smile and parties and full pockets, because he was, wasn’t he?

  
But, as it happens, he isn’t.

  
Because the truth is, he’s a fraud. Endeavour was the only thing real in his life, a warm weight pressed beside him. Without him, all he is is emptiness. A forgotten masquerade mask left on the ballroom floor.

  
He could have given him a chance, couldn’t he? Let him know he was going? That’s all he wants now. At least to say goodbye.

  
Bixby begins a swift march down to the garage. He never could get him to sign the paperwork on that Jag—legally it’s still his. By God, if he’s taken that thing, he’ll call the goddamned police, report it stolen. Have them drag him back here so that he has to tell him to his face that he’s leaving. Let’s see how he’ll like it when . . .

 

  
Bixby stops. No. He’d not do that.

  
He opens the side door of garage. The Jag is there, parked.

  
Then Bixby’s anger turns into something else, something akin to fear. So, what does that mean, then? Did he just wander off into the night? Did he even take some money? A coat? Bixby would bet money he didn’t.

  
He turns back to the house and he’s coming up the front steps, and his throat feels dry and he doesn’t understand—it’s as if he can’t swallow. And suddenly his eyes are swimming, and my God, is he seriously going to cry? He would not have thought himself capable. And there’s a quiet low voice in the darkness that says, “Are you all right?”

  
And Bixby wants to laugh at the cosmic, cruel joke of it—that he should hear that voice in his mind, a voice that’s low and rolling, a voice that would be blue if it were a color, just like a pair of blue eyes he’s unlikely ever to see again . . .

  
“You look done in,” the voice says. “What are you doing out here?”

  
A blanket on the porch seat moves, and they’re there, luminous in the starlight, the blue eyes he first saw in Oxfordshire . . .

  
“Endeavour?” he asks.

  
“Hmmmmmm?”

  
“What the? What the hell are you doing out here?”

  
“Oh,” Endeavour says. “I suppose I fell asleep out here. Sorry.”

  
As if that’s an explanation.

  
Endeavour moves over a bit on the seat. “You should sit down. You look knackered. What happened to you.?”

  
“What happened to . . . ?” Bixby begins to laugh, shaking his head. His feet move as if by magic—he’s hardly conscious of what he’s doing. Endeavour’s brow is furrowed; he looks at Bixby as if he’s sickening for something.

  
When Bixby sits down, he feels the press of warmth beside him. An arm reaches around his shoulder, pulling him close.

  
“But what were you doing out here in the first place?” Bixby asks, at last.

  
“Oh. Well,” he looks pained for a moment, but then takes a deep breath. “Well, if you really want to know…. I don’t know…. it sounds so stupid now that I say it out loud.”

  
“What?”

  
Endeavour smiles a rueful smile. “There, well, there are these finches. Look. The daft things built a nest right here in the window box.”

  
“Yes, finches do that.”

  
“They’re awfully exposed, aren’t they?”

  
“So . . . what . . . are you _guarding_ them, then?”

  
Well, I wouldn’t say _that._ But I started thinking about them and I couldn’t sleep . . . so I thought. . . . I might as well . . . well, it couldn’t hurt, can it?”

  
“But it’s freezing out here.”

  
“Cold doesn’t bother me. It’s fine.”

  
But the cold bothers Bixby. He feels like he’s been plunged into a center of ice and then abruptly pulled out again. His head feels like it’s spinning . . . like its full. Like its full of snowflakes. A hand cards through his hair and he closes his eyes for just a minute. . .

  
And finches connect to . . . . he thinks. Finches connect to . . . what?

  
_They’re awfully exposed out here, aren’t they?_

“How come you never talk to me anymore?” Endeavour asks. “About what you’re doing. You know, with work. You used to, back in Oxfordshire.”

  
“I don’t know. You have your own work to do now, I suppose. Before you were just a drunk loafing around in my library.”

  
Bixby feels the huff of a soft laugh beside him, warm, but not warm enough to thaw the feeling of ice.

  
“You could still ask me things, if you wanted. Or is it because . . . are you. . . .”

  
Bixby hears the worry there, understands immediately. “No. I’m done with that. Did you see anyone come around here to ask questions when Rose went down?”

  
“No,” Endeavour concedes.

  
“I told you—I never had anything to do with that side of things. And that’s down to you.”

  
“So, if you had . . . anything like that again… anything you thought was questionable, would you tell me?”

  
Bixby looks at him, confused. “Of course.”

  
Endeavour’s eyes seem to waver back and forth at unclockable speed, searching his face. Then he takes a deep breath, the sort one might take before jumping into a cold lake in spring.

  
“All right,” he says, carding his hand through Bixby’s hair. They sit there for a long while; Bixby knows they should go back upstairs, but somehow he can’t bring himself to stir; his heart, so recently racing with adrenaline, is only now slowing to rest.

  
He’s just beginning to fall asleep, when Endeavour, his warm arm still wrapped around Bixby’s shoulder, drops his fiery head of spirals and curls to Bixby’s chest.

  
“I love you, you know,” he murmurs. As if it’s they’ re the easiest words in the world, as if he said them every day.

  
Bixby’s heart lurches—it’s like being plunged into ice and then into fire –zipped along with no waning—gone from being left to being –is it possible?—loved, and all in the space of ten minutes.

  
Bixby is left to stare into the darkness. He’s been wanting to hear those words for so long. But coming as they have, they didn’t have the reassurance he thought they’d carry.  
Perhaps it was because by the time his mind had caught up with Endeavour’s words, Endeavour was already sound asleep. He didn’t have the chance to close the deal, to say those three words back to him.

  
****  
Bixby wakes with a crick in his neck, a warm weight on his chest and something tickling under his chin. He opens his eyes . . . it’s a head of curls, picking up reds and golds like they always do in the stark morning light.

  
And. Christ. Did he just spend the night on the porch? They had better get inside before Madame Zumofen comes; they look like a pair of lunatics.

  
*****  
Bixby sleeps in an extra hour. When he gets up and stumbles into the bathroom, he finds a mess of curl ends scattered on the bathroom floor. Oh, they’re ninety-five percent in the bin, but there are still a fair few scattered across the floor.

  
“Damn it,” he says, bending down stiffly. His back is sore as hell from sleeping on the porch. He gathers the bits and tosses them into the bin.

  
At least he must have cut that hair a bit, Bixby thinks.

  
When he comes down the stairs, Pagan’s wary eyes are gone. Endeavour doesn’t even look up right away at the sound of his step. He’s scribbling in a notebook, square jaw working furiously on a corner of a cherry tart.

  
“Morning,” he says, absently.

  
“Good morning, Endeavour,” Bixby says.

  
Endeavour looks up, bemused, no doubt, by the surprising formality. Then he glances out the window, where a finch is fluttering to its nest.

  
Suddenly, all those furtive glances out the front window make sense. He wasn’t waiting for some sign from some secret lover. He was watching over a nest of finches. Bixby wants to laugh, but he doesn’t. Endeavour’s face is more peaceful than it has been for weeks, and Bixby can’t shake the feeling that it’s due in part to the fact that he’s confessed one of his little secrets to him and he hasn’t scoffed.

  
Thank God that’s all over, is all Bixby can think. They’re due to pick up the Thursdays next week.

  
*****  
At the airport, Bixby spots the Thursdays straight away, and he and Endeavour head over to where they’re waiting at the gate.

  
“Hello, there, Morse,” Thursday rumbles, in his rich, low voice.

  
And then it happens: and it happens so fast that Bixby almost doesn’t see it.

  
For the briefest of moments, Endeavour casts a worried look behind him. As if Thursday had addressed someone else entirely, someone he half-expected to find standing directly behind him. Then he gives a gentle shake of his head.

  
“You can call me Endeavour, now,” he says.

  
“Oh, well, that’s fine then, love,” Mrs. Thursday says.

  
Bixby feels a slow chill wash over his body.

On the drive home, Bixby is more grateful that Endeavour is making small talk with the Thursdays than he would have imagined possible.

  
Because his mind is spinning.

The worst irony of it all is: He never thought he’d settle down with one person.

  
And now, he’s beginning to realize, maybe he hasn’t.

  
***  
Once they’re home, Endeavour shows the Thursdays their suite. It’s a second honeymoon for the them—or rather, more like the first, since it sounds as if they were married in rather a hurry during the war. Bixby had the rooms in the east end of the house made ready for them, thinking that that way they’d have privacy, be able to come and go as they pleased. And they’d all be far enough away from one another that no one need hear anything, lest anyone’s child-parent illusions or English sensibilities be offended.

  
In the meanwhile, Bixby sits on the arm of the sofa, his arms crossed, feeling uncharacteristically unsociable. He’s remembering suddenly a conversation he and Endeavour had had several weeks ago, soon before the awfulness had happened. A conversation that at the time he felt was funny—just one of those prime examples of Endeavour quirkiness—but now, the memory of it leaves him feeling somewhat alarmed.

  
****  
“My publisher is sending you a package. I just wanted you to know,” Endeavour said, standing in the doorway of Bixby’s study.

  
“Me a package? What on earth for?”

  
“That French translation. You said you would look at it.”

  
Bixby laughed. “I can’t imagine what I could possibly contribute.”

  
“All I wanted you to do was look at them. You’ll know if something sounds off. If it doesn’t sound like me. How I’d say it.”

  
“I suppose I could give it the old college try,” Bixby said. “But shouldn’t you ask . . . I don’t know. I just haven’t read anything.”

  
“You’ve read Faulkner, surely.”

Oh, Christ, Bixby thought. Faulkner.

  
His distaste must have shown on his face because Endeavour, asked, “You’re not particularly fond of Faulkner?”

  
“God no,” Bixby said. “All that narrative jumping around. I like a story to have a beginning, a middle and a clear end.”

  
Endeavour smirked.

  
“I suppose you think I’m terribly uncultured for saying so, old man,” Bixby said.

  
“Not at all,” Endeavour said. “I just find it interesting that usually if I bring up literature, you plead absolute ignorance. But you seem to have quite an opinion on Faulkner. I’m guessing you had to read him in school—your town must be proud of its native son.”

  
“Would you stop with that?”

  
“Stop with what?” Endeavour asked, a feigned look of innocent surprise across his face. 

  
“You know with what. With the Oxford, Mississippi thing.”

  
Endeavour raised his eyebrows. “I don’t recall saying Faulkner was from Oxford, Mississippi. You certainly seemed to be well-versed on the topic.”

  
Bixby laughed. “Gracious,” he said. “You certainly must have been hell interrogating people.”

  
Endeavour looked affronted, as if he’d never dream of being so rude. “ _Interrogating_ people?”

  
“You know, when you were with the police.”

  
Endeavour looked at him blankly. “Oh,” he said, finally. “Yes.”

  
“Christ,” Bixby laughed, bemused. “For a minute, it looked like you hadn’t the slightest clue what I was talking about.”

  
Endeavour dismissed this. “Well, that was . . . that was a lifetime ago, really.”

  
*****  
“My, aren’t you looking well Morse,” Mrs. Thursday says. “I mean, Endeavour.”

  
“Thank you, Mrs. Thursday,” he says.

  
“You should call me Win, love,” she says.

  
Bixby suppresses a laugh at this: he still calls him Joss only about fifty percent of the time. Mrs. Thursday is fighting a losing battle there.

  
During dinner, Bixby only half-hears the conversation. Sam has joined the army, Joan is working in a shop.

  
“Have you heard about the merger, then?” Thursday says.

  
“No,” Endeavour says.

  
“There’s no more Oxford City Police. We’re Thames Valley Constabulary now. We all of us are working at different stations. I thought I might retire; bit too old, I thought, to get used to the new ways. Jakes has gone—Jim is still about—at a different station than me, though.”

  
_A lifetime ago, Bixby thinks. Oh, God._

  
“Hmmmm. I was sorry about that. The last time I talked to Strange was on that day, when you first came to the Bruce and Kay’s. I . . . Well. I sort of yelled at him. I didn’t know at the time that I’d never talk to him . . . . He’d always been decent to . . ,

  
_And the reviews that Bixby has read, the ones he’s seen before Endeavour had snatched the arts and entertainment section of the paper for the crossword. All the reviews praising his "range" . . ._

  
“Well, I’m sure he understands. Tell you what: I’ll pass it along that you said hello, how’s that then?

  
_. . .is that because, I don’t know, the poems are being written by three different people?_

  
“Bixby?”

  
_And hasn’t he, Bixby been doing the same thing? “You know what, Pagan?” “Good morning, Endeavour.” And now he whoever-he-is wants him to read the goddamn French translation his poems and say whether or not they sound like him? Which him?_

  
“Bixby?”

  
“What?”

  
“Did you hear what the Thursdays were asking?” Endeavour says. “About us going to Paris with them on Friday?”

  
“Of course,” Bixby says.

  
And the most galling part of the whole night, Bixby realizes, is the concern with which Endeavour is considering him, as if he’s gone completely barmy. When really, maybe he’s just beginning to understand.

  
****  
Bixby had thought the Thursdays might want to go to Paris alone, as a sort of April in Paris romantic getaway. Instead, they have a trip to Provence planned for the weekend, and were, in fact, hoping that he and Endeavour would come along with them to the city. They’ve heard, like most English tourists, that the city can be tough to navigate and not the friendliest of places towards those who don’t speak French fluently.

  
At the Louvre, Endeavour chats away happily, giving details about each painting they pass in turn.

  
It’s actually funny as hell: at each painting, he starts off by giving a real little lecture until he seems to realize he’s being a bit of a pedant and clams up. Bixby wants to tell him: he really doesn’t mind. If he’s looking at something, he might as well know what it is.

  
When Thursday comments loudly on how small the Mona Lisa is, Endeavour’s square jaw goes tight, like he’s in actual pain. It’s priceless. It’s enough to make Bixby fall in love with the man all over again.

  
Bixby dreaded lunch, half-expecting a torrent of English jokes about French food. But Mrs. Thursday, it transpires, has a keen interest in French cuisine, and is willing to give things a try.

Afterwards, they forgo some of the sights, and she and Endeavour dive into a few bookshops, looking for a cookbook that has the recipes Mrs. Thursday wants to try at home. She had taken some French in school, and while she doesn’t feel up to trying to converse, she feels comfortable enough with the simple vocabulary of recipes.

  
Bixby and Thursday, not being particularly keen on books or cooking, stand about at the door while Thursday has a pipe. It’s not as awkward as he would have imagined.

Bixby has spent half of his adult life playing the good host, after all. He just never thought he’d be hosting the in-laws.

  
****  
The next morning, Bixby wakes to find an empty, rumpled spot beside him.

  
Well. Those finches.

  
Maybe yesterday had left Endeavour a little anxious after all—the collision two—or was it three?— of his worlds in one.

  
Bixby goes out to check the porch, but he’s not there. Did he go for an early morning walk? It’s possible . . . but why would he leave when he has guests?

  
Breakfast is a little awkward without Endeavour there as a bridge.

“Where’s Morse, then?” Thursday asks.

  
“I don’t know," Bixby says. "He must have gone for a walk.”

  
The Thursdays decide to venture into the village. It’s a picturesque little place, probably a better picture of the real France then the tourist sights they had hit in Paris. Mrs. Thursday wants to see a real French bakery. And the countryside is beautiful this time of year, everything beginning to burst into bloom.

  
Bixby tries not to show his worry. He spends the morning in his study, but he can’t concentrate; he can’t shake the feeling that something is not quite right.

  
He wouldn’t do this to me, Bixby thinks, wildly. He wouldn’t do this to me. Not after he’s said what he said. And certainly not with his own guests right here.

  
Or was this his idea of a kindness? Making his exit while Bixby had guests, knowing him so well, knowing that he’d feel forced to keep up the mask, to not fall apart?

  
By the time the Thursdays return for tea at four, it’s getting more and more difficult to dispute it.

  
Endeavour was gone.

  
*****************  
Endeavour wakes up and opens his eyes, but he can see only dark green, like the woods, but they’re made of silk. And his head feels heavy . . . like everything is far away. . . he’s lying on something soft and scratchy, but it’s far away below him, and it’s not concrete, it’s not . . . and he tries to move his hands to clear his eyes, but he can’t . . . his arms are pinned behind him and he feels he should be panicking but he can’t. . . his head is just so heavy . . . and there are voices, but they’re soft, just people chatting, not taunting. The voices are speaking French. He’s in France, not . . .

  
“Do you think the car thing was too baroque?” a man’s voice is saying.

  
“Hell no,” another man says. “Do you know what we’ve done? We’ve outdone the Phantom and Bix. We’re doing this in style.”

  
He hears a door open. A shuffle of movement.

  
“You idiots,” a woman’s voice says. “Don’t you know who that is?”

  
“Yes, it’s Bixby’s bit, isn’t it?”

  
“It’s Endeavour Morse, you uncultured goons. He’s a goddamned English poet.”

  
“Yeah,” says the second man, the one with a trace of an Italian accent. “Like the man said, Bixby’s bit.”

  
“Idiots,” the woman repeats. “How are you planning to move around with him? You don’t suppose he’ll be recognized?”

  
“We don’t need to worry about that. With Phillipe’s help, we’ll know if the police are coming before they know it themselves. And besides, this whole deal won’t take long. Bix knows how to play the game,” the man says, laughing to himself.

  
“The game? Do you think he’s going to think it’s a game, that you’ve drugged and tied up his lover and thrown him in the boot of your car?” the woman says.

  
“He’s fine. And Bix doesn’t take these things personally. He’ll appreciate the audacity of the whole thing. When I saw his name on that slip you gave me, I thought I’d had died and gone to heaven. Not only did we get the painting right from under the Phantom’s nose, but then we got Bix to hide the thing for us. I tell you, my dear, this will be one for the books. It’ll be the stuff of legend.”

  
“If you say so. Sounds like an awful lot of waffle to me.”

  
“The point is the waffle. This is an art heist, sweetheart, not a thuggish, low-class bank robbery. It’s all about style.”

  
Trying to keep up with the French makes Endeavour’s spinning head feel heavier, fuzzier . . . He feels he should . . . and then he’s drifting, and it’s just like being in the rowboat out at Tony’s aunt’s country house.

It was the last time they were all together at the country house, a week or so after they had staged that horrible bacchanal, the one that seemed somehow to go so badly wrong.

  
Pagan never asked the others about what they had felt that night. When he and Pippa had returned, Susan and Henry were just sitting on the porch, as if nothing had happened. “Bruce and Kay went looking for you,” Susan said, as if they had been naughty children who had run away from home.

  
But later, Pagan felt that he wasn’t alone, that the others must have experienced something odd that night, too. There was a tension in the air, the same he felt when his parents quarreled before their divorce, the same he felt between his father and Gwen when his father’s license got taken away. Pagan did as he always did. Laid low and kept quiet, doing his crosswords, deliberately keeping out of the fray.

  
“Where’s the newspaper?” Pagan asked.

  
“Henry took it,” Susan said.

  
“Why? He always leaves the old one for me, for the crossword.”

  
“Oh, Devvy,” Susan sighed. “The world won’t end if you miss it for one day.”

  
“Well, where is it?” Pagan said.

  
“Yes, Susan, where is it?” Bunny said. “Why shouldn’t Siegfried look at the paper if he wants? There’s probably some very interesting items in the local section.”

  
“Leave off, Bunny,” Susan snapped.

  
Pagan furrowed his brow, was about to ask what Bunny meant, when suddenly, from outside the window came the sound of screeches and screams and heart-breaking cries. It was the finches, the ones he watched each morning on the porch while Henry pursued his endless task of translating Paradise Lost.

  
He ran to the window to see a pair of grackles, each dragging a naked and helpless baby finch from the nest and then throwing it to the ground.

  
Pagan raced out to the porch. It was horrific beyond words: The grackles flinging the babies to the stone floor of the porch with a crazed and reckless cruelty, the parents, helpless, fluttering their wings and crying, hoping to attract the grackles’ attention, hoping to be chosen for death themselves to save the chicks they had worked so hard to rear.

  
And there stood Pagan, in size and intelligence, he was like a god in comparison to the finches. He ought to be able to help them. But he was just as powerless. He wanted to open his mouth to shout, to scare the grackles off, but it was all like a nightmare, one of those in which you open your mouth and strain to cry out, but you’re paralyzed, you can’t utter a sound.

  
And there would have been nothing he could have done anyway. By the time he was out on the porch, the last gray, featherless chick was flung to the ground, dead before it had even had the chance to open its eyes. The parents were still crying, screeching overhead—a sound of despair so sharp it cut Pagan to the bone.

  
By the time he found his voice, he could only choke out the first judgement that came to his lips. “Murderers! You murderers!” he shouted over and over again. And he must have been completely unhinged, because he heard the shouts, and didn’t realize it was he who was shouting until someone was slapping him hard across the face again and again, stunning him into silence.

  
“Are you mad? Have you gone mad?” Susan cried. “What the hell are you doing, screaming like this?”

  
“For God’s sake, Susan,” Bunny said.

  
****  
When they were packing to leave, he could feel someone behind him, hovering in the doorway. He turned. It was Kay.

  
“You know that’s not normal don’t you?” she said.

  
God, Pagan thought. He’d never hear the end of this.

  
“I’m sorry,” Pagan said. “It was just so bloody awful. They don’t even eat the chicks, do you know? They just do it to be cruel, to keep the population of other birds down.”

  
“No,” Kay said. “I mean Susan. “What would you say if you came out on the porch and saw Bruce screaming and smacking me across the face like that?”

  
“That’s different,” Pagan said.

  
“How is it different?”

  
Pagan huffed a frustrated laugh. “She’s a girl. It’s not a big thing.”

  
Kay crossed her arms, looking stubborn. “I don’t see how it’s all that different.”

  
“Well, it is different,” Pagan said.

  
It was fine.

  
Because Pagan loved Susan.

  
And so he blinked and looked away.

  
He would always stay with her, always.

  
And then he and Susan were standing on the bridge. And she left him.

  
****  
A few weeks later, he was coming back to his flat, when he found her hovering around outside his building.

  
“What the . . . ?” she said when she saw him. She reached a hand up to his hair, as if he were still hers, as if she had the right. He ducked away.

  
She stood there, staring. “What the hell have you done to your hair?”

  
“I cut it.”

  
“Cut it? It looks like you shaved it. Why did you do that?" 

  
Pagan watched her warily, took a step back, already feeling himself fade away, turning into someone else entirely, someone who had finally learned how to play their game.

  
“What’s it to you if I’ve shaved it?” he said, looking as bored and imperious as possible.

  
“You haven’t been to any tutorials in weeks,” she said. Then her eyes narrowed, “What are you up to?”

  
“I’ve just been busy,” he said tartly.

  
“Why are you acting like this? What’s wrong with you?”

  
Pagan shrugged.

  
“Well, stop it right now. It doesn’t suit you at all.” She paused, considering him. “You better get to tutorial tomorrow. Professor Morrow is going spare.”

“I’m not sure I can spare the time,” Pagan said.

  
Susan rolled her eyes. Then apropos of nothing, she said, “Let’s see your room.”

  
“What?”

  
“Your room, Devvy. You aren’t packing up and thinking of leaving are you?”

  
“What a thing to think,” he said.

  
“Then you’ve got nothing to hide then, have you? Let’s see it.”

  
“Fine,” he said, with a careless shrug.

  
He led her upstairs; she stalked around the room, satisfied that the place was as big of a tip as ever.

  
She stopped in the doorway. “Just because I don’t think we should be married doesn’t mean I don’t love you, you know.”

  
Pagan snorted. “I would have supposed that’s exactly what it meant.”

  
She ignored him. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  
He was getting on the bus tomorrow, but she need never know. He had a suitcase all packed, inside the wardrobe, but she hadn’t noticed that, distracted as she was by the records lying around all over the place.

  
But Pagan was leaving all of that behind. Whoever lodged there next could do with it as he would.

  
Pagan would hardly have need of a collection of opera records at basic training.

Pagan took one last stroll through Oxford. He knew he was walking toward a death of sorts. After all, Pagan would have no place in the army.

  
The bus was parked by the side of the road. A sergeant was waiting outside, with a clipboard in hand.

  
“Name?” he asked.

  
“Morse,” Morse said.

  
****  
In the army, he spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He came in and put on his headset and listened to the numbers roll off. They had their own tempo. Just like music.

And Pagan once again became Morse.

  
Which was helpful, actually. Morse knew not to hope for anything much. How to accept things as they were. Morse had figured that out years ago, kneeling behind a woodpile, on the day he had stopped being Endeavour.

  
And during those years in the army and then in the police, Morse came to understand, finally, that his existence was tainted in some essential way. That he simply wasn’t meant for happiness.

  
He learned to be alone, because he had always been alone, after all.

  
He had known all along that the world of parties and country houses and laughing in an overloaded rowboat on a shimmering lake was not a life in which he belonged. It was a faint bubble of a world that floated and popped and left only emptiness behind.

  
But, just because his life was fated for unhappiness, didn’t mean he was doomed to powerlessness. He could still fight for the cause of love and happiness, for others. And who better than he to make that sacrifice? Wasn’t that clean, wasn’t that simple of fate to arrange it in such a way? That the one who had nothing anyway, who no one would miss, should be the one to stand before the monsters of the world?

  
To find the little girl locked in a coffin by a madman, to free a girl from her twisted, controlling family, to stop the killers before they did more harm?

  
Morse could do it all alone. And he needed no one and he was invincible.

  
Until he wasn’t.

  
Leaving Pagan behind to sift through the wreckage. But it wasn’t the Pagan who had so stupidly followed Susan out to Henry’s car. It was the Pagan who stood, arms crossed in front of his building, watching warily. A Pagan who had learned that love deceives, that people deceive, the everything deceives.

  
And there is no comfort or protection strong enough to keep you from the vast, unending awfulness of it all.

  
And then—what—two months and he’d forgotten everything? Grew soft and dreamy, trusted people it was clear should never be trusted.

  
But Pagan was already tired of being always on the alert, watching for who might be considering him from the corner of their eyes.

  
And then at the gala in London, when Jakes was trying to talk to Morse, he was suddenly so tired. And it was easier to drink and drink and let his head fall on the first warm shoulder that would take him far away from all of it. And all of them.

  
But then Pagan went even further than that, letting himself be called Endeavour again, a name he had abandoned long ago.

  
“ _You do know,” Bixby said, “if you don’t use your name, other people will go ahead and come up with a name for you, don’t you?”_

  
_Endeavour stilled at this._

_“I suppose that might be true,” he said._

  
And so Pagan let Bixby be the one to come up with his name.

  
Because Endeavour loved Bixby.

  
And when the truth of what Bixby was stood before him on a large, dark canvas, he blinked and looked away.

And he would stay with him, always. 

  
And that’s what landed him here.

  
And why is it that some people never learn? You would think between the three of them, one of them could have gotten it right.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

 

Bixby sits slumped on the sofa, his hand pressed to his forehead.

“I’m so sorry,” Bixby says. “This is terribly awkward. I don’t know how to apologize.”

“Shouldn’t we call the police?” Mrs. Thursday says.

“And say what?” Bixby asks. “The man is thirty-one years old. I can hardly have him dragged back here against his will.”

“But surely he wouldn’t have just left without leaving any sort of note?” Mrs. Thursday persists. “Surely, he would have packed a bag for himself at least,” she adds, with an appealing look to her husband.

Bixby sighs. He knows the lady is trying to be kind but. . .

“Of course, he would,” Bixby says. “This is what he does.”

Thursday stands, his arms folded, and says nothing. And suddenly, he’s grateful as hell to the old man for not disputing it. It was he, after all, Bixby had heard, who brought Endeavour’s record player out from his old flat to that sad little lake house.

 “If I’m going to call anyone,” Bixby says bitterly, “It should be that madwoman, Susan Winter. We could commiserate, trade tips. I bet she knows what second-hand music shops offer the best prices for old opera albums.”

“Now, now,” Thursday intones, “none of that now.” He stops and rubs at his chin.  “I’m just going to go outside, have a look-see.”

Well, that’s fine, he’s a detective, after all. Good luck picking up that trail. If that obsessive Susan had a hard time tracking him down, he doubts Thursday will.

He’s probably hotfooted it back to that shabby little lake house. Or who knows? Maybe he’s run off with someone he was meeting in the woods after all.

“I’ll go see if Madame needs any help with tea,” Mrs. Thursday says.

And now he realizes. They both feel sorry for him. They’re giving him the space to fall apart.

But Bixby has no intention of doing that.  He’s bloody angry. And he’s just thought of something.

He strides up the stairs, adrenaline pumping, and tears down the hall. Once he’s reached their room, he grabs Endeavour’s side of the mattress and lifts it up. A fat wad of francs falls out onto the floor.

His first thought is: he knew it. He knew it all along.

His second thought is: that pretentious little bastard. Couldn’t he have at least taken his money with him?

Oh, but he doesn’t need money of course. He lives off clouds and poetry, doesn’t need to eat like mortal beings when he’s busy _thinking._ He’s just that goddamn ethereal.

Bixby lets the mattress fall and comes around to sit on Endeavour’s side of the bed, contemplating the mess of objects on his bedside table. And suddenly, he’s sad beyond words. There are so many questions now, that he'll never have answered, so many things he’ll never know.

Like why on earth was he saving these fir cones?

The bastard. He could have at least packed a few bags for himself. Spared him from having to go through it all, this sad little jumble of crosswords and scraps of paper and cufflinks, all the leftovers of their one-time, short-lived life.

He’s not sure how long he sits there, lost in thought, his head in his hands. Finally, he hears a voice, tentatively calling from down the hall.

“Bixby?” Thursday calls. “You should come take a look at this.”

Bixby looks up—whether he has been sitting there for a few minutes or for an hour, he’s isn’t sure. He gets up and goes out into the hall.

 “What is it?” he asks

Thursday leads Bixby out to the circular drive, where he’s left one of his Jags, a red one, parked out front. There, scratched on the paint of the back fender is a word and some numbers.

_Psalm 39:6_

What the . . . ?

“Any idea who might have done that?” Thursday asks.

“No,” Bixby answers. He can’t imagine Endeavour doing something like this; he can’t imagine a world in which he’d been so angry he’d leave a parting message for him by damaging a Jag. That would be akin to sacrilege.

Bixby turns on his heel and stalks back up to the house. He’s heading for exactly the spot he had just left five minutes ago, although now it seems like the whole world has changed in that space of time. It’s a message for him, he’s sure of it.

And not just a message. A ransom note. 

He tugs hard on the drawer of Endeavour’s bedside table. Damn, he keeps everything; Bixby can hardly get the thing open. Finally, the drawer gives way, and Bixby sees what he’s looking for—the Bible Endeavour’s mother gave to him when he was young, the one that has _Endeavour_ printed on the inside in childish block print so large that the U and the R are on a separate line.

He flips it open to Psalms. Thursday is there, standing in the doorway. So Bixby reads aloud.

“Surely every man walks about as a phantom; surely they make an uproar for nothing; he amasses riches and does not know who will gather them.”

****

In the end, it’s Madame who calls the police. Bixby is simply too stunned.

When they arrive, they scour the house, ask Bixby if they might take this or that.

One officer goes into Endeavour’s study: Bixby can hear him tinkering with this typewriter, trying to isolate Endeavour’s fingerprints in case they might help them in their search.

Bixby doesn’t care what they do, what they take.

All he can think of is: whoever had left that message must know him pretty well. Whoever left that message was right: he was a phantom.

Maybe Endeavour Morse was somehow a snowstorm, a confusion of three people, but Joss Bixby was no one. Nothing but a game of make-believe, nothing but smoke and mirrors.  

But together, they were two, with more than enough left over to breathe life into the space between them.

 

*************

Morse stood up on the pedals of the old bicycle, pumping double-time, giving the thing a bit more oomph on the incline ahead. He was carrying a heavier load than usual, what with Joycie riding on the handlebars, and with a satchel of possibly stolen potatoes on his hip.

Or, at least,  he suspected they might be stolen.

“Thompson owes me five quid from the race Saturday last,” his father said. “He hasn’t paid up. Why don’t you go out to his field, get a few potatoes for next week. Just stick close to the fence.”

“Take your sister; you’ll be quicker,” he added, as Morse headed out the door.

Typically, he headed out on these excursions alone; the fact that Joycie was allowed to accompany him showed there was most probably some truth to their father’s claim. Still, it seemed a gray area to Morse.

Although so much concerning his life was just that: a gray area. And in more ways than one.

He wondered if his mother had had a premonition of this, if she knew far, far, in advance how his life might be.

One of the first indications Endeavour had that anything was amiss came shortly after his eleventh birthday, when his mother had taken him to buy a new coat.

“What do you think?” she had asked, pulling the large garment up at the shoulders.

“Well, it’s a nice coat . . .” he said, trying to be agreeable  . . .  “but does it have to be so big?”

It was two inches too long over his wrists. His mother had always been thrifty, but not so thrifty as this. He dreaded going to school in the thing—he was already the odd one, sitting quietly in the back, trying to deflect attention, trying not to seem like a know-it-all.

“You’ll fill it out fast enough—you’re like me, all arms and legs,” she laughed.

He tried to smile in agreement.

But now, at sixteen, he was grateful that she had done that, because he was still wearing the thing. It was as if she had known that it was going to have to last him the rest of his childhood, until he could be the one to afford another.

And she most probably did know that was how it would be. Once, after she had gotten sick, Endeavour had overheard her talking to one of the ladies from the meeting house.

“If only God would give me five more years, I’d go happily,” she had said.

He knew only too well what she meant by five years: he knew that she didn’t wish for five more years for herself, but for him—five more years would deposit him at nearly seventeen, near the finish line of childhood, when he’d no longer need her.

Well, God hadn’t answered her prayers, but he could have told her there was no surprise in that.

Not that he ever would. It seemed to give her comfort believing that he believed, thinking she had left him something that would sustain him, give him hope, in the grim years to come.

But Endeavour saw little cause for hope. At his father’s house, life was just an unending study in gray. Gwen had made it clear from the start that he was nothing but a nuisance, and dimly, even at twelve, he recognized that if Gwen could have no sympathy for a boy delivered to her door fresh from his mother’s funeral, there would never be any help coming from that corner.

But when his father lost his license after racking up too many charges of driving while intoxicated, their life became positively surreal.

From the outside, he was sure, they looked like a normal family. Sturdy brick house, mother, father a brother and a sister. Look a little more closely, and things fell apart. It wasn’t just that people realized he looked nothing like Gwen and Joycie, that he didn’t really belong to the family; the house itself became a mish mash of disparate parts, just as the family was.

They had turned the gas off and now heated the place only by burning firewood in the living room downstairs. He and Joycie still had their own rooms—Joycie even had a pink canopy bed, bought in the days when their father had the money—but, often, the prim, matching boy’s room and girl’s room were only for show— in the depths of winter, he and Joycie snuck downstairs and slept on the hearth rug, waking tangle-haired and disoriented on the floor.  

And the rabbits. At twelve, it had been a rite of passage. “Make a man” his father had grumbled. Now they shot rabbits the way other families went to the supermarket.

Endeavour remembered well the first time his father had taken him out on the green. It was like a nightmare. Such, small, tender creatures nibbling at the grass. They let him come frightfully near, as if they sensed he was sort who would do them no harm.

And then he shot them to pieces.

He sat that night at dinner feeling sick, his stomach twisting upon itself. He had betrayed the most innocent of beings and now their mangled carcasses were before him on a plate.

It had been hard enough eating as it was, what with Gwen watching him like a hawk, grumbling, as if every bite he took was robbing food from Joycie. As if he were a cuckoo in the nest, slowly starving a sweet little robin.

It hurt, especially because he’d not harm Joycie for the world. She was his best friend, had been so for longer than his father and Gwen even knew.  

So all Endeavour could do was sit there, staring at his plate, lost in thought, when his father growled, “Why aren’t you eating? What’s the matter with you?”

He cast about for something to say.

“I’m a vegetarian,” he said.

“A what?” his father asked incredulously.

“A vegetarian. It means I don’t eat meat.”

“I know what it means,” his father sputtered, annoyed. “I’m not stupid.”

Endeavour looked down. He could tell when his father was just getting started.

“What’s this, then?” he barked. “Is this some of your mother’s Quaker pacifist shit?”

Endeavour flinched. It was a shock to hear anything referring to his mother in such a way.

And then, before he had time to register what was happening, his father was standing over him, his hand firm on his jaw, forcing his mouth open. He scooped up a handful of the stewed rabbit and shoved it in his mouth, closing it again and then covering his mouth.

Endeavour felt like he was gagging; he couldn’t breathe.

“For God’s sakes, Cyril, if the boy doesn’t want to eat, then let him be,” Gwen said. “It’s just more for the rest of us.”

“I’ll not have Connie say I’m letting the boy go hungry,” he said.

Was he mad? Endeavour thought. As if “Connie” would say anything. She was dead and under the ground, he wanted to say, if he could have opened his mouth to speak.  

His father held his hand over his mouth. Tears sprung into his eyes as he struggled to breathe through his nose, struggling against the disgusting feel of chunks of rabbit meat lodged in the back of his throat.

“I don’t have time for your shit, do understand, Endeavour? Next time, just do as your told.”

Endeavour understood.

As soon as he was released, he fled the table and ran outside, seeking the first refuge he could find. Off to the side of the house was a tall, towering woodpile. Endeavour dove behind it and vomited into the grass.

And as he kneeled there, sobbing beside a pool of undigested stewed rabbit, he came to understand something; suddenly, he felt older, much older than his own mother, who had been young and hopeful enough to put so much faith in something she couldn’t see.

He wanted to believe like she did, wanted to believe that she was happy in heaven. But he couldn’t believe she was there. Couldn’t believe that she could be somewhere. If she were somewhere, she would come back if she had the power, if only for the briefest, barest of moments, just to let him know that he wasn’t alone, just to let him know that, if he endeavoured, he would get through these years and one day he’d be free.

But she hadn’t come. She was nowhere. She was slowly turning to bone, six feet under the ground behind the meeting house.

Endeavour. He couldn’t understand why she had given him such a name. It seemed a name for one cursed to try and fail and keep trying anyway. He wiped his face. There was no point in crying. He was a Morse now. He might as well get used to it.

The first thing that would go would be that ridiculous, hopeless name.

“Call me Morse,” he told Headmaster Stephens the next day at school.

 The Headmaster blinked and looked at him curiously, but asked nothing further. He was the sort headmasters liked—the sort that got good marks without bothering anyone, the sort who didn’t make extra work, the sort who kept quiet.

“Alright,” he said.

And Morse knew how not to hope for anything much. How to accept things as they were.

As the years passed and their poverty increased, Gwen grew harder, even more tight-lipped. She would assign him chores but then stand over him while they were done, criticizing his every move. It would have been easier for her to have done them herself, if that’s how she felt about it, but she seemed to enjoy bullying him about.

 Dimly, he realized that she, having little power over her own life, must be taking comfort in bullying an even lesser being. He almost might have felt sorry for her, if she weren’t so determined to make his live a misery. He at least, had the chance of escape in a few years. Her fate had been fairly well determined.

“Why are you using that rag to polish the bannister? That looks like one your father’s used to grease the door hinge.”

Morse said nothing, went to the bucket in the cupboard to fetch a different one.

“Why are you using that rag? That’s one of my best dish rags.”

“Which one would you like me to use?” he said, unable to mask his exasperation any longer.

“Stop acting so superior.”

Morse fought the urge to sigh.

It seemed he was often told that sort of thing. “Stop looking so superior,” Gwen would bark, even when he was just thinking or looking out the window or otherwise trying desperately to avoid her.  

He discovered a new trick: keeping a simple-minded smile on his face while he played an opera aria in his head. That way, only part of him need to be subject to her constant nagging.

But then it backfired: one night, while he was doing dishes, he lost himself to it, stared singing under his breath.

This irked Gwen as well.

“What do you have to be so goddamn happy about?”

Which was almost surreal, considering how often she had said. “What are you moping around for? Do you want me to give you something to be sorry about?”

It all came to be too much for Morse. He could usually find refuge in his room with his record player, but every now and then, she would pursue him even there, nagging and finding fault, taking out on him her own displeasure and unhappiness.

Once, he had left his books spread out on the table right when she was getting ready to shell peas. He could hear her thundering up the stairs. “what’s this?” and “absolutely no consideration for anyone else” and “just like his mother head in the clouds, staring off into space all the time like he's so above everyone” and . . . and she tore open Morse’s door, carrying on her tirade until he was cornered . . . and . . .

 . . . and Morse couldn’t take it. Before he knew what he was doing, he had leaped out of the window.

It was only two floors, and he did it in such a way—clinging to the window ledge and then softly dropping to the ground—that he was fine. His ankle hurt a bit, but it was a small price to pay for those precious few moments of silence.

Or so it seemed at the time. When he looked up, Gwen was looking over the edge, her face red with rage—whether at the oddness of what he had done or because her cornered quarry had managed to escape, Morse wasn’t sure.

  
“Are you mad? What are you, trying to kill yourself now? If I’ve told Cyril once I’ve told him a hundred times, there’s something wrong with you. I’ve told him he should get you looked at.”

Killing himself had been the furthest thing from his mind. But at the moment, it sounded like a splendid idea.

He started keeping a list of all the different ways he could escape. All the different ways he could kill himself. It was quite a list, and Morse came to feel quite proud of it, outlining all the pros and cons of each method he might use to break free, to run away from them all.

There was only one flaw in the plan.

The con was the same in every column.

If he were to go missing, the first person who would most likely come looking for him would be Joycie.

  
He couldn’t bear the idea of her finding him, bloodied. The idea that she might feel the way he had been made to feel every Saturday when he shot rabbits.

Because Joycie was his best friend. They’d been friends of a sort, ever since they met, before they even knew they were half-brother and half-sister.

****

It happened two years or so before his mother died: Endeavour had been sitting in class one day, when one of the school secretaries came to his room, hovering in the door.

“Could I borrow Endeavour for a moment? He’s needed in the office.”

Endeavour looked up, stunned. The office? He was never sent to the office. But this secretary was new. Perhaps she didn’t know that.

On the way, the secretary explained. “It’s your sister,” she said. “She had a bit of a tumble off the playground, jumping off the swing. Her knees are pretty bad, we’ve tried calling your parents, but we can’t reach them. We think she may have sprained her ankle.”

Sister? he thought, as he was ushered into the nurse’s office. He had no time to ask, and, anyhow, he wasn’t the sort of child who questioned adults.

There, on a cot, a rough-and-tumble little girl with brown plaits was sobbing, her knees a bloody wreck; she must be quite the daredevil, Endeavour thought. It looked much worse than anything he had done himself at that age.

The nurse was padding at them, working to get bits of gravel out from under the skin. Endeavour winced. It did look painful.

“What were you pretending to be?” he asked.

The little girl stopped crying, and looked up at him with bright, dark eyes, as if that was the first sensible question anyone had put to her all day.

“A flamingo,” she said.

Endeavour smiled at this. He had thought for sure she would have said a robin or a seagull.

“I know a story about flamingos.”

“Do you?” the girl asked.

He didn’t, but he was good at making stories up.

“We’ve tried reaching your parents,” the secretary was saying. “Do you know anywhere else your mother might be?”

“ _My_ mother’s at work,” Endeavour said, cautiously.

“Oh? We don’t have a work number for her in Joyce’s file,” she said. She pulled another file off the desk. Then she looked from one to the other. Something she saw made her face go frozen. He and Joycie exchanged glances. You never could tell what grown-ups were thinking.

Just then, Headmaster Stephens came in, and did an odd little double take.

“Endeavour, why don’t you go ahead back to class?” he said.

“Alright,” Endeavour said. He went to the door and turned. “I hope your knees feel better,” he said to the little girl.

“It’s alright. They don’t hurt that bad.”

It was fun, he decided, being a big brother even if was only for a few moments. He felt it was his duty, at least, to leave her some good advice.

“Next time, if you want to be a flamingo, you should just imagine it. You know, in your mind.”

“I know,” the girl said heavily. “But it isn’t as much fun, is it?”

“I suppose not,” he said, and then he left, while the secretary murmured, “ . . .  an unusual last name. . . I just assumed. . . .”

After that, Endeavour would often see the girl around the school or out on the playground. If she forgot a pencil, she would run up to him to borrow one as if she had the claim. It was sweet actually.

And then one day it happened. It was bound to. Lincolnshire was not London, after all. He had been in a shop with his mother, when he noticed his father, standing over by a counter.

His parents were divorced by then, and he hadn’t seen his father in months. Somehow, he had assumed his father must have moved far away. But there he was, right there in front of him.

“Dad?” he asked.

His father turned, looking shocked to see him.

Suddenly, a woman with dark hair went over to his father. She was tugging a little girl by the hand. It was the little girl from school, the one who wanted to be a flamingo.

“Come along, Cyril,” the woman said. And she and his father left without a word. As they went through the door, the little girl turned and looked over her shoulder at him, a look of confusion on her face.

“Well,” his mother said, more to herself than to him. “I’ll certainly not be chased off. I’ll leave when I’m good and ready.”

 Endeavour didn’t understand.

The next day the little girl found him on the playground, where he sat under his favourite tree with a book.

“My parents had a huge row last night,” she said, her eyes wide.

“Did they?”

“Usually, when they row, they’re really loud, but last night, I could hear them in the kitchen and mum was hissing up a storm. So I stood around the corner and listened.”

“Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves,” Endeavour said sagely.  

The little girl made a prim little face at him, as if to say, well aren’t you the precious little goody-goody?

“My mother was angry. About the lady we saw with you in the shop. She said that since dad’s divorced from her now, he should marry her, that it’s not fair that I’m a bastard.”

Endeavour winced at the word.

The little girl picked up on his expression. “What’s a bastard?” she asked, uncertainly.

“Neither of _us_ are,” he said. He may be young, but he wasn’t so young as to not have an inkling as to who the real bastard in this scenario was.

And the little girl was not so slow on the uptake herself.

“I think you’re my brother,” she said.

Endeavour put down his book. “I think I am too.”

“My mother doesn’t want me to know about you. But I’m glad you’re my brother.”

Then she turned and ran off.

Then she ran back.

“Oh,” she said. “My name's Joyce.”

Then she ran off again, off to where a group of girls were skipping rope, as if it wasn’t all that bizarre what had happened, as if you figured out your father had a secret, separate family every day.

****

 

From the moment he moved in with his father and Gwen, Joycie had been the only bright spot in his life. “I know we’re only a half-brother and half-sister, but could we be a real brother and sister?” she asked. “Everyone else I know has got at least one.”

“Sure,” he said.

And as terrible as Gwen was to him, he was grateful beyond words that she didn’t take out her bitterness on Joycie. She was all the mother, after all, that Joycie had.

At least Endeavour had the memory of someone who laughed, someone who crushed mulberries to make pink icing for Christmas cake, someone who showed in a hundred ways that she loved him.

Often, he felt he was the luckier of the two.

It was a puzzlement, to him, to consider the way the two women had named their children—his mother on her worst day lived with more joy than poor, practical, anxious Gwen did on her best, and Gwen lived as if the only thing she had to look forward to was a long, difficult endeavour.

****

Over the years, he and Joycie became the best of allies, were as close as real brother and sister, even though they looked nothing alike. Partners in crime in stealing apples and potatoes, and good company during the times they laid low, while Gwen and their father rowed downstairs.

She was even interested in his records. “Tell me the story,” she would say, and he would, only he fixed them up a bit. In his version, Romeo and Juliet ran away and lived happily ever after, Carmen lived a high life in the gypsy camps.

He wondered at himself for this. When Joycie grew up and knew the truth, would she feel the same way Endeavour had felt about his mother’s stories about God on that long ago day that he knelt behind the woodpile, vomiting up the harmless creature he’d been made to kill?

Maybe not. After all, her life might turn out quite differently.

****

Or Morse hoped so, anyway. At least a life that held something brighter than stealing potatoes at any rate. The thought made him glance over his shoulder.

They were nearly home when they both saw him. Morse heard Joycie utter a gasp at the same time he did. Headmaster Stephens was standing in their driveway.

“What did you do?” they each asked the other simultaneously. Neither could imagine what infraction could have brought on this, the headmaster pursuing them at home on a Saturday.

God help them.

Morse slowed down, pulling up beside him.

“Mr. Morse, Miss Morse,” he said, nodding, by way of greeting.

“Hello,” they said uncertainly.

“I wonder if I might have a word with your father?”

He might do well to wonder. It must be three already. He was fine enough in the morning, but by noon it all began to go downhill. He was usually good and sloshed by five, and lying on the floor snoring loudly by eight.

“We haven’t done anything,” they both said at once.

The headmaster laughed. “No, no,” he said. “It’s not that.” He looked at Morse. “I was hoping to talk to your father about your scholarship.”

“My what?” Morse asked.

“About your scholarship. The deadline is approaching and we haven’t . . .”  he paused, noting, no doubt, the surprised look on Morse’s face.

 “You don’t know anything about it?” he asked, furrowing his brow.

“No,” Morse said.

“It’s for Oxford. . . And you are supposed to be leaving in September, but we haven’t heard . . .”

But Morse didn’t hear the rest of the sentence.

All he heard was: _you are supposed to be leaving_

If he hadn’t been holding on to the handlebars of the bicycle, he might have fallen over. He couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it was finally, truly happening.

Because, yes, he was supposed to be leaving. He was supposed to be leaving on the day he had first got there.  He was supposed to be leaving for years.

Oxford meant escape: he felt he could almost start sobbing with the relief.

_I’ve done it.  I’ve done it._

At Oxford, everyone was a good student; they wouldn’t find him odd, and he might fit in and have friends and he’d be free and he’d never come back here again and . . .

And he was in a daze as he led the bemused headmaster into the house, lost in thought, until he heard his father say . . .

“He isn’t going.”

Morse’s head snapped up at this, his mind suddenly clear of all else.

“The scholarship doesn’t cover everything, does it?” his father was saying. “He’ll need extra money for food, probably need fancy get-ups and all sorts.”

Headmaster Stephens laughed dismissively at this. “Well, you’re paying for his food and clothes now, surely.”

He and his father and Joycie all looked away at that, leaving the Headmaster looking confused. He didn’t understand that it would be unlikely he’d be allowed to hunt rabbits and forage for half-rotted apples at Oxford.

“He’ll be allowed to work during the summer hols,” Headmaster Stephens was saying uncertainly, but his father cut him off.

“Besides, he’s the only one who knows how to fix the cab,” his father said.

Morse could not believe this was happening. “The cab’s gone, impounded,” he snapped.  “What difference will that make?”

“I’ll get it back here and then I’ll be needing you to help me, what.”

“I’ve tried to teach you the basics at least a dozen times,” Morse said. “How to change the oil at least. You’ve just always been too goddamn lazy to pay attention!”

“Why you ungrateful little …”

Headmaster Stephens drew himself up to intervene, but before he could, Morse stepped up to his father and said, “Oh, I’m going. And there’s no way you can stop me.”

“Well,” his father said, regarding him for the first time with a modicum of respect. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we?” he said.

****

It was four in the morning when Morse got up, on one of the first brisk mornings of September.

He opened his window and gently, with a tied sheet, lowered his record player to the ground. Then his suitcase. Then, wearing the coat his mother had bought him, now definitely short on his wrists, he went out on the sill, clung to the ledge, and lowered himself until he could land softly into the grass below. In his pocket, he had the paperwork he needed, filled out by Headmaster Stephens, and a bus ticket to Oxford.

"I'll pay you back," Morse had said, as he left the Headmaster's office.

"I'm sure you will," he said. 

For years, he had dreamed of nothing but this day. But, in the moment that his fingers left the window ledge, he felt the smallest pang of regret. This was the end of the story. There would never be anything now between him and his father. There were so many times it could have ended differently.

Over the years, he had become more and more of an accomplished shot, but there was never a word of praise, never a “good job, lad.” There head only ever been a grunt, as if to say, well, maybe you aren’t completely hopeless.

All the times, he stood under the hood of the cab, making some repair, there could have been a “thanks, lad, you spared me taking it into the shop.”  

But the moment had never come. And now it was past coming.

Nor could it have been any different: there was no way to win with him, after all, was there? Do something worse than he did, and you were pathetic, useless. Do something better and you were a little wiseacre, too clever by half. 

Every life is different, he supposed. Knowing what it was like to have a father was just one thing his life would lack.

Or so he thought, until, after the army and two years in uniform, when he thought he’d be beyond needing such a thing. Until a night he sat in alone on the Cowley CID. Or thought he sat alone.

Thursday, he thought.

If he could get a message somehow to Thursday, clue him in as to what this was about, Thursday would come and look for him, surely.

Bixby, he realizes, would hide the fact that he had the painting. He’d want to get what he could for it. Just like he did with everything else in his life.  

Now Endeavour realizes that Susan and Bixby were just alike after all. Bixby had just been cleverer about cloaking the fact.

He remembers a morning after one of Bixby’s parties, overhearing Henry and Kay.

 

 

“I wish you and Tony would stop making your reports to Susan about this Pagan and Bixby business. She’s driving me mad,” Henry said.

“Well, surely she must have seen something like this coming,” Kay said. “I sort of thought that was why they split up to begin with.”

That backstabber, Pagan seethed, to be gossiping about him to them. But after all, he supposed, she was one of them now.

“She’s taking it all quite personally, I’m afraid,” Henry said. “Poor darling; it’s a bit like some bastardized version of Pygmalion, except in this case, the statue jumps off her pedestal and runs off with another woman.”

Pygmalion, indeed, Pagan had huffed, rolling his eyes. As if he were still her creature.

He had long since, long since, moved far beyond her and her world. He had lived a hundred lives since then.

 

But then, hadn’t Bixby done the same thing, acted in the same way? Fretting about his hair, his clothes, insisting that he accept that honorary degree, giving him that pedigree?

Endeavour now remembers Joss' delight when he’d been recognized at that gala, as if it was somehow a victory for him, proof that he had once again outdone them all, been the one to see in him, Endeavour, what all the others had not. As if acquiring him as a lover was just one more triumph, a slap in the face to those who looked down on him for his lack of background, lack of name.

Think I’m uncultured, poshies? Well guess what? I’m buggering your Poet of the Year. So screw you.

Literally.

By god, it was galling, humiliating beyond all belief. It was not to be borne. 

Endeavour really was a dewey-eyed idiot, Morse thought.  After all, how was he so different from Pagan?

They both of them were so quick to just give themselves away. Didn’t they understand how dangerous that was? Pagan— at least you could give him the benefit of the doubt in light of his youth. But Endeavour was pathetic –he had been twenty-eight when he jumped into this mess. And that’s just what he did, too. He saw the truth right before him, on a canvas nearly two meters high, and he closed his eyes and jumped.

But Morse, Morse knew better.  

Morse didn’t need anyone.

And Morse was getting out of here.

He gives a sharp, strong pull to his wrists. And then another. And then another. And suddenly, he feels something thick and warm running down to his hands. Damn. He doesn’t feel any pain, really. He must be numb from the drugs. All he’s doing is making a mess of things. But this might work to his advantage.

He rubs his face against the arm of the couch he’s lying on, moving the blindfold up. He's in a room, he sees, that looks like an office. He pulls again and again on the ropes binding his wrists until he can feel a thicker trickle of blood running down to his hands.

He stands up, arms behind his back, and looks around the room. There must be something he can touch, some way to leave a message.

And then he sees it.

There's a calendar on the desk. He couldn’t have asked for better luck.

 _Jeudi_ is written along with the other days of the week across the top. Jeudi—Thursday. He presses a bloody thumb against the word, hoping to leave a clear print.

Now, the painting. This is all about the painting and his head is spinning from standing up. They’ve got him on something, that’s for certain. He can barely think. And are those steps he hears in the hall?

The painting. The Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence.

St. Francis, his dates are 1181-1226. He presses his thumb against the numbers, marking the days of the week, 11, 8, 1, 12, 26 and St. Lawrence, his dates are 225-258. He presses his thumb 22, 5, 25, 8.

He scuffles a few papers over top with his fingers and throws himself back on the couch, rubs his face to shove the blindfold down. He hears the door open. His heart is hammering so hard in his chest, he’s sure whoever is coming in must hear it, must see it beating against the blue wool of his jumper.

He forces himself to lie absolutely still.

“Oh, God, he’s a mess,” the man with the Italian accent says.

“Claudette will kill me when she sees this sofa.”

“She’ll kill you when she sees him. She seems to like his stuff. I think she’s harbouring a crush.”

“Shut up.”

Morse feels a pressure, like a cloth being placed over his wrist.

“Hey, you? Are you awake? Hey? Morse?”

But Morse lies absolutely still.

“Must have drifted off again,” the second man says.

“Yeah, well, he’s sure bloodied up his goddamn wrists. Was awake and struggling at some point. Here, hand me that, will ya?”

Morse feels his sleeve shoved up, feels a sharp sting.

Damn. He had hoped they would think he was still out for the count; he hoped to try to regain some sort of clarity.

 

But now he’s sliding again. And colors are blurring before his closed eyes, and they are like brushstrokes, like the swirls of a painting.

And he’s standing before a painting. And he’s Pagan and he’s in an evening suit. And beside him is the man that he had warned himself to avoid whenever possible.

“It’s a copy,” Pagan says. “A fake.”

“How do you know?’ the man asks.

“Because the real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum. I’ve seen it.”

“And how do you know that the one in the Rijksmuseum isn’t the copy, and this one the real one?” the man asks.

“Uh . . .  I think the curators would have noticed.”

 

And Pagan looks at the man, and, to his surprise, an odd expression flickers across his haughty face. As if he’s . . . crestfallen?

Because it wasn’t a joke or a ruse after all; he really thought he had found the real thing.

And if he once bought a counterfeit painting thinking it was real, might he have bought an authentic painting, thinking it was just a copy?

Of course, that’s what happened.

But, then, Endeavour asks: Why wouldn’t he tell the truth about it when I all but asked him? Why would he hide it? Why even buy such a thing?

And Pagan looks at him, his arms folded, his mouth twisted in a condescending smirk, as if they both should have guessed it all along.

“Same reason he bought the first one, isn’t it?" he says. "It was probably meant to be a present. For you.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there is nothing in canon to suggest that Morse's dad was a bit of a bigamist, but this was just one way to explain why in Endeavour, Joyce looks like she's pretty much Morse's age :0)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The flashback scene in Chapter 5 lines up with the epilogue of After the Bacchanal--but from Pagan's point of view....

Chapter 5

 

Bixby sits on the sofa, his head in his hands, letting the words wash over him.

One of the officers is explaining that the police, following a lead on two strange men and an unfamiliar car spotted in the village, have managed to track Endeavour’s captors to their safe house. Unfortunately, once the police arrived at the scene, the place was empty—they looked like they had cleared out fairly quickly.

But one officer who searched the house did find something of interest: a calendar marked with bloody thumbprints.

Bixby looks up sharply at this.

At first, the police thought it must be a message left by the kidnappers, but, on further inspection, they found the prints belonged to Endeavour Morse. The mark on the word  _Juedi_ is the perfect match to prints found on some books in his study.

“Would you have any idea as to what these numbers might mean?” the officer asks, holding out a piece of paper.  Bixby can hardly take in what the man is saying, let alone offer any opinion. His mind is hovering around the words _bloody thumbprints_ and _Endeavour Morse._ He lets out a groan. He feels like he might be he sick.

Thursday walks over to the officer, takes the paper, and sits beside Bixby on the couch, holding it up for him to read. It’s a paper written by the police: it has one word at the top— _Jeudi—_ and a series of numbers. The original calendar, he supposes, must be locked up with whatever evidence they have; or maybe they’ve made this paper up to spare him from looking at something stained with Endeavour’s blood.

He looks at the paper _. Jeudi._

“ _Juedi_  means Thursday,” Bixby says, relieved to be freed from the responsibility of it all. He simply can’t think. “He must have meant it for you,” he adds. But Thursday looks at it and shakes his head.

“I very much doubt if the lad could find something with your name on it,” Thursday says. “Marking mine was most likely just his way of letting us know that it was a message from him. But I’m sure it must be meant for you.” 

He means it as a kindness, Bixby knows, but Bixby feels unequal to the task.

1, 5, 5, 8, 8, 11, 12, 22, 26

The numbers mean nothing.

Bixby puts his head in his hands again. “Are you sure this isn’t some sort of police code he’s using?”

“Fairly certain, son,” Thursday says. “Seeing as the Cowley CID didn’t have such a thing.”

Would have been helpful if they did, Bixby thinks. He looks at the numbers again. There is a 26. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. Could each number stand in for a letter? Bixby works it out and gets:

A E E H H K L V Y Z

He moves the letters and tries to put them in different combinations.

E K H A L Z V E Y H

What is this, some, Hebrew prophet?

It means nothing.

“Well, the lad is trying to send a message. That shows he’s thinking clearly anyway," Thursday says.

Oh yes. A great sign, Bixby thinks, wildly. He’s leaving a message in his own blood. Yes, that’s a comfort.

“Morse is a cool glass of water,” Thursday says. “Nothing ruffles him too much. I wouldn’t overworry. If we can’t work this out, I’m sure he’ll find a way to try again.”

But Bixby wants to wail in despair. He’s sure Morse—Thursday’s Morse—is very cool water. But if Morse is cool water, then Endeavour is the thin glass that’s holding it.

And Pagan—Pagan is an erratic crack across the whole affair.

“Shouldn’t I have been contacted by now?” Bixby asks. “Why don’t they just say what they want? Wouldn’t that be more direct?”

But the officer says it isn’t strange that they haven’t yet heard anything. It’s not unusual for kidnappers to wait a bit, leaving the loved ones time to worry—the theory being that they will be all the more willing to negotiate when the demands are made.

Over in the corner, the police are setting up a machine, a bulky thing with a faux wood exterior and with buttons and tape reels and still more buttons, preparing to tape and trace any call that might come in should the phone ring.  

The best way to help is to decipher the numbers, the officer says.  See if they mean anything.

Bixby tries to think: If he were Endeavour, what would the numbers mean?

And then it strikes him: they are page numbers.

“May I take this?” Bixby asks.

The officer nods. “Of course.”

He tears into the library. If this is a message to him, it must be from something that Endeavour has mentioned to him once before—that would only make sense.  

Bixby pauses, tries to clear his head. Well, there’s Dante. He’s forever assigning things to the Inferno.

He finds the book on the shelf and opens it. The thing has line numbers _and_ page numbers.

He looks from the book to the paper given to him by the police. So many possible combinations.

Oh, God, why is he doing this to me? Bixby thinks. He knows I’m wretched at this sort of thing. Couldn’t he have made this clearer?

 

No. Bixby mustn't panic. He just needs to be patient. Approach it methodically. Follow the patterns. Just as he first learned to do long ago, when he began tracing the rise and fall of stocks.

One. There’s a one. Line one.

_“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself in a forest dark.”_

A forest perhaps? But what of all the other numbers? Why not just a one?

Bixby finds one of Endeavour’s notebooks on a table and pulls out a piece of paper. He writes the numbers across the top, then different combinations. Dante, he’s mentioned him. And then there were those times he had teased him about the Great Gatsby and Faulkner. And oh yes Aquinas and . . .

_“There is no greater sorrow then to recall our times of joy in times of wretchedness.”_

Well, that could apply, could be true enough if he’s held hostage somewhere, but it’s hardly helpful.

_“But the stars that marked our starting fall away. We must go deeper into greater pain, for it is not permitted that we stay. “_

The stars did mark their beginning, on that dock long ago in Oxfordshire. But “not permitted that we stay?” He would know that Bixby is not the sort to give up that easily.

_“Because your question searches for deep meaning, I shall explain in simple words.”_

If only you had, Endeavour, if only for once in your life you had.

Bixby moves from book to book: he’s certain when he hits on the right words, he’ll know it, he’ll feel it in his gut. And . . .

_Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed._

Stars again? Outside somewhere?

 _“_ _He thought that it was loneliness which he was trying to escape and not himself. But the street ran on: catlike, one place was the same as another to him . . ._

_“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . ._

_And as to science it is essential to have firm adhesion with intellectual vision, for science possesses certitude which results from the understanding of principles: while faith holds a middle place, for it surpasses opinion in so far as its adhesion is firm, but falls short of science in so far as it lacks vision And . . ._

“Good Lord, son.”

Bixby looks up to find Thursday there, leaning in the doorway.

 

 

 

Thursday is looking around the room in amazement. And so Bixby looks, too. There are books everywhere, pulled out, lying open on the floor, draped across chairs; the room is a snowstorm of paper.

Bixby beholds the disaster, stunned. Of course, he wants Endeavour to be found.

But he hopes the police will give him five or ten minutes to put this away before Endeavour sees what he’s done.

******

By three in the morning, the Thursdays convince him that the best thing to do is to sleep on it: he’ll have a fresher head in the morning.

On his way up the stairs, all of Thursday’s words about Morse—meant to be comforting—ring through Bixby’s mind: Morse, the police officer that was once Thursday’s favourite protégé, sounds as if he was quite the stoic—level-headed and coolly self-possessed.

If it is Thursday’s Morse who left the message, if some police instinct has kicked in, Bixby very much doubts he will be the one to decipher it.

Somehow he feels that he and Morse aren’t all that well acquainted.

But he doesn’t tell Thursday that. He doesn’t want Thursday to look at him like that.

 

He climbs into his side of the bed and closes his eyes. And drifts and there’s . . .

_My heart in hiding stirred for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing_

_After-comers cannot guess the beauty been . . ._

_And blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion._

Gold vermillion. Gold vermilion.

And when he wakes, he gasps:  Endeavour is back, his face is there in the darkness, framed by wild waves of gold vermillion hair.

Endeavour is straddling him, and Bixby feels fully hard against the warm, familiar weight.  And Endeavour is pressing narrow, pale hands across Bixby’s chest, his sinewy arms flexed as he leans forward, so that his face— all big eyes and lush mouth and austere cheekbones—is moving in, closer and closer.

And he’s regarding Bixby solemnly, and he hasn’t been gone for long, but Bixby had almost forgotten what he looks like . . .  and now Bixby is drinking him in . . . the slim column of his throat and strong thighs framing his legs pushing down and . . . Bixby aches with want and he reaches up to take his hips in his hands and . . .

“You’re back,” he manages at last.

Endeavour nods. “I told you I wouldn’t leave, didn’t I?” And leans in closer.

“But how do you know this is the real thing and not a copy?” Bixby asks, desperate to make sure Endeavour had not made a mistake.

“Because the real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum,” he says. Then he tilts his head and looks at him. “I’ve _seen_ it.”

And he leans forward and gives him a kiss so warm and deep that . . .

And then Bixby wakes and it’s not dark, but light, a stark white light that echoes coldly throughout the room.

Bixby stares for a moment at the ceiling.

Then he takes the paper from the bedside table and looks at the numbers.  

They mean nothing.

And he realizes: it’s over. He’ll never find Endeavour again. How can he hope that he’ll ever decipher any clues he might leave behind, how can he ever understand him?

 

After all, the first thing Pagan ever said to him was “I can’t hear you.”

 

************

The first thing the man ever said to him was, “Do you have everything you need?"

 

Do I look like I’m fresh off the bus from Lincolnshire? Pagan thought.

 

_Pagan and Kay were walking along the edge of the lake._

_“It’s odd, isn’t it?” Pagan said. “Everything they say, it’s like. . . they’re really saying something quite different.”_

 

Pagan had heard it all before. Especially questions like that: ones to which there was no safe answer.

If you said _no,_ the reply would be: “Well, I have the remedy for that.”

If you said _yes_ , you’d be sure to hear: “Are you sure about that? Because I have a little something you might be interested in.”

 

And, a few days later, predictably enough, the second thing the man said to him was: “I have a little something you might be interested in.”

Pagan looked at him blankly. “I very much doubt it,” he said.

“Pagan!” Tony said, stunned by his rudeness. “I’m afraid he’s had a bit too much,” he added, by way of apology.

Pagan laughed to himself. If Tony thought that was so terrible, he ought to thank his lucky stars he hadn’t said the first thing that popped into his mind.

The polished, poised, perfect mask of a man faltered, smiled uncertainly.

“It’s a painting,” he said, “It’s quite a recent acquisition. I was wondering if I might get your opinion, old man.”

Well. Ten points for originality.

“It’s right through here,” the man said, and the next thing he knew, he had his arm looped around Pagan’s shoulder and was steering him through a crowd of revelers and a swirl of colored lights. Pagan allowed himself to be led, but cast a look over his shoulder to see if Tony was coming, too. But by then he was too busy chatting up some girl in a green mask.

Thanks a lot, Pagan seethed.

Pagan sized the man up: he had about an inch or so on him, a stone and half, two stone at the most. And there were plenty of people about: Pagan may be drunk, but he was certainly not drunk enough to allow himself to be lured into an empty room.  

And, at any rate, Pagan was fairly adept at defending himself. Ironic, wasn’t it, that it would take a failed classics student to come to a police officer’s aid?

Because strangely enough, in prison, Morse wasn’t of much use. Pagan supposed that Morse’s trouble lay in the fact that he was so unassailably high-minded; he was simply never able to grasp the reality of his situation. He was too stunned to think, let alone react.

“How’s Inspector Thursday?” Morse asked. “Is there any word?”  

“You should know, seeing it’s you what killed him.”

“What?” Morse gasped, barely able to breathe.

“From what I heard, there was you and three dead bodies out at Blenheim Vale. Three dead bodies and you. Don’t take a detective to work that out.”

Morse sank down to the ground. “This can’t be happening,” he whispered.

He said that quite often.

But it was happening.

 Morse might have gotten blindsided by a pair of thugs in Pettifer’s office, but Pagan learned to be cautious, to keep his eyes down, to listen for footsteps behind him.

And then again, Morse had such strong sensibilities about justice and order and fair play and so forth. Always was such a sanctimonious pain in the arse whenever Thursday gave some piece of scum what he had coming.

Well, there certainly wasn’t much sense of honor and fair play in the cell block, that much was clear. None to be spared for a cop killer at any rate. Pagan quickly learned to give up any such compunctions.

Pagan fought dirty.

It wasn’t that you needed particular skill: All you had to do was make it not worth their while. Pagan learned how to thrash in such a way that a man holding him would find his own arms twisted as much as his own and let go, trying to get a better grip. This would give him the time he needed to create a space between them and then give the man a good sharp knee right to the diaphragm.

Or better yet, to shift himself slightly lower and give it to him right in the groin.

That was good for double insurance.

And then there was his greatest weapon: his voice.

He couldn’t remember when he began—one night he just felt so desolate, so lost, he started singing. Just softly at first, but then his voice grew louder. And it turned out: he was really good. Oh, Morse was fine of course, good enough for choir, but he was such an awkward sod; he always held back. Beneath his dignity to let all that emotion loose, Pagan supposed.

Well, dignity was something Pagan had lost long ago. Pagan went ahead and tore it up. After all, what else did he have to lose?  

If singing opera had irked Gwen, it was nothing compared to the effect it had on a cell block full of lowlifes at one in the morning.

And two in the morning.

And three in the morning.

“God, make him shut up!”

“I’ll quiet you down when I get the chance!”

“Shut up all of you,” the guard said. “You can dish it out, but you can’t take it, what? You all deserve one another. Besides, he’s got to sleep sometime.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Pagan called out, in singsong voice that always seemed to unnerve them.

Pagan never slept.

He just launched right back into another score. He’d switch it up, often, switch languages even—that really drove them wild.

“Stop it! Stop it!”

 “He’s absolutely raving!”

The idea seemed to frighten them. From then on, Pagan found that with just a certain look, he could intimidate them, keep them at bay.

But then, it all backfired.

Music had been the only thing they had, the only reminder that there was beauty in the world.

And Pagan had turned it into an instrument of torture, the soundtrack of hell.

Well, he was done with all of it anyway. His record player and records were all back at Morse’s old flat, and he’d never go back there. The thought of running into that gentle nurse Monica or kind, dependable Thursday made him shudder. He’d not inflict he sight of himself on unsullied people like them.

He was done with music.

Until the day Thursday brought it all back.

Pagan supposed it was Thursday’s familiar presence that convinced Morse to raise his head, led him to stick his nose in where it was no longer wanted.

When Thursday first brought the record player out of his car, Pagan was visited by a desire to run up to him, to seize it from his hands, and to smash it against the ground. To pick up the larger pieces and hurl them to the ground, too. Smash Smash Smash. God, it would be satisfying.

But Thursday was such a decent soul. It would hurt him if he behaved like that, he knew. And he couldn’t bear that. Joycie and Thursday. Those were about the only people left that he loved. The only ones he knew who could move through this world without taint.

So he let Morse cart the thing in. Morse was keen on it, that was certain. Doubtless, he was searching for some strain of sanity—that’s what Morse loved in music after all—the measure, the clarity, the restraint, the peace, the harmony, the beauty.

So he put his little record on. And in about ten seconds, he forgot everything. Just drifted off right away.

Pagan would be damned if he would let him forget that easily. Next thing you know, he’d be back in Bright’s office, raising hell about some notebook or ring that “disappeared.” Pagan had no intention of being led down that primrose path again.

He ripped the thing off the turntable and smashed it. It felt pretty good, too. There, what do you think of that Morse? he laughed.

That shut Morse up for a while. He always disapproved of that sort of thing.

Such a proper little sod.

*****

So, Pagan didn’t fear the man who had trotted him off to “look at a painting.”

But he was certainly suspicious off him.

He was well put-together, Pagan would say that much for him. All poise and elegance. His voice measured and polished and warm. Every hair in place, dark eyes all suave as hell and a broad smile and a flash of white teeth.

It was as if the man were not real, just glitter and flash.

They were all of them in that set fairly untrustworthy people. And he must be the most untrustworthy of them all, Pagan reasoned. He seemed to be have been appointed their king, after all.

And, of course, sure enough, the painting was a fake. Pagan didn’t mince words telling the man so. Best make it clear he wasn’t one to be toyed with. Save those games for someone willing to play.

***

But then, one day they were all out at the lake, and he and Pippa were sitting on the dock and swinging their legs, and it was just like those golden days when they had all been so happy. Before everyone had learned to put on their masks, when they still were children enough to wear their natural faces. Back when they loaded into Tony and Henry’s cars and went to parties and danced under fairy lights, all dressed up and playing grown up. Back when they walked along the edge of the lake and took picnics into the fields and got caught in rainstorms.

It was a day so much like the ones they once spent at Tony’s aunt's country house, that Pagan began to wonder if fate had brought them all back together. Maybe they were being given a second chance, to fix whatever it was that had gone so terribly wrong all those long, sad years ago.

And Pippa seemed to feel so too, because she laughed and shoved him off the dock, just like she would have ten years ago for saying something morose. And, then, of course, he pulled her in after.

Once Pagan wiped the water from his face, he looked up at the man. He was stunned: for there it was, the tiniest hint of a crack in the man’s façade. And once he looked through the crack, he kept going, deeper back and deeper, until he understood that the man was not at all what he seemed.

He was possibly the loneliest person Pagan had ever seen.

And he had seen lots of lonely people.

Pagan did it on a whim: he reached around the man’s knees and pulled him down into the water with them, and the man was so surprised at being included in the absolutely ridiculous adolescent stupidity, that it almost broke Pagan’s heart.

It made him feel frightened for the man, too.

For now, Pagan realized, the little episode with the painting had not been a trick or a ruse: he honestly hadn’t known that painting was a fake. He didn’t know what was real and what was not.

And Pagan began to watch the man more closely. It was scary: it was like watching a peacock strut about in a tiger’s cage—and you want to turn away because you can’t bear to see the bloodbath that’s coming, the beautiful feathers shredded into the air—but it’s like a nightmare, one of those dreams in which you want to shout or run, but you’re frozen to the spot.

 It’s not just the painting that’s a fake, Pagan wanted to tell the man. They are all of them frauds. They say what they don’t mean, and they don’t say what they wish with all of their hearts to say. They’re dangerous and the world is dangerous, and here you are smiling like it’s all a game, like you really believe you have some control over your fate. Like you really believe in your good luck. Like you really believe in happiness.

 

****

Pagan was tired of everyone, tired of all of that terrible music, and, most of all, tired of worrying over the man. He went out under the dock and stood under the stars.

And there, sure enough, the man followed straightway, gliding thought the trees with his Scotch, looking just like a prince of a fairy-tale castle.

He came up and stood next to Pagan and said, “On a night like this, a man might believe that anything is possible.”

Pagan stood for a moment, stunned.

Dear God, if he believed that, he was beyond Pagan’s help.

But, somehow, those words, coming from this man, rang true. And they sounded like bells.

And they caught Pagan by such surprise that he laughed: and that surprised him, too.

But there was something worrying there: Did the man not know how dangerous it was to say things like that? How could someone so good at playing their game in some ways be so awful at it in others? Was it safe for him to be wandering around alone amongst these people?

He wanted to warn the man, to tell him: look, I’m only part of a person and still I’m one of the few real people here.

The man was a danger to himself.

As they walked into the woods, Pagan’s mind was racing, his heart beating half-mad with fear. Pagan decided: the man needed to know the truth.

So when the man leaned him against a tree, Pagan went frantic: he pulled the man down on top of him, down to the ground: he wanted the man to crush him, to go ahead and take him, to feel that he was real.

The man had to learn what was true and what was not: it was the only hope Pagan could see for him.

The man was heavier than he had thought, and Pagan had to shift to press their bodies closer together, and the man pushed his shirt up, definitely more than willing to follow Pagan’s lead. But then, something made the man’s face change: Pagan wasn’t sure what it was, but in one swift instant, his expression went from desire to . . . pity?

Well. To hell with that.

He gave it to him right in the diaphragm. Knocked the breath right out of him with one sharp knee.

He wanted to say, “How dare you feel sorry for me? I’m the one who feels sorry for you!” and burst into tears.

He wanted to say, “That’s a little trick I learned in prison,” and give a wild laugh . . . that would give the man something to think about—that would teach him not to be so trusting, perhaps. . . to think before he wandered off in the woods with a stranger like a child.  

 Instead, Pagan turned and left.

And then the man got into a row with Bruce: “You lost fair and square, old man,” he heard him say. Pagan couldn’t stand it anymore: did he think that made a difference, when you were dealing with so-called people of the world? What was “fair and square?”

Pagan tried to intervene:  that was a mistake, letting his mask drop.

Because from then on, the man would just not give up. He was like a freight train; nothing seemed to be able to divert him from his course.

And the man said: have a tangerine, and look here, old man, these suits I ordered from Paris are a bit small, why don’t you . . . and I know you haven’t been outside of a five-mile radius of that little shack of yours for months, why don’t you come with me to London.  . . .

And Pagan said: Go to hell and leave me alone and I don’t need a warden.

And the man blinked and kept right on rolling. As if whatever Pagan had said was just the most charming damn thing. It was bizarre: it was as if the man could not fathom a world in which things would not eventually go his way

 

 

Pagan would sit in the man’s library, stunned at what he heard. God knows what he was getting into.

And then Thursday had told him about the Rose investigation, how Bixby was among those the police were keeping tabs on.

Pagan had tried to warn him, but Bixby just waved his hand. “I’ve nothing to do with that, old man,” he said.

“That won’t matter to them if they decide to come for you,” Pagan said. “You think they look at the evidence first, and make their deductions from that? No. If they make an assumption, if they decide it’s you they want, they’ll find what they need one way or another to make that happen.”

Bixby looked confused. “That’s ridiculous; it doesn’t work that way, surely,” and then, added, eyeing him uncertainly, “I thought you were a police officer.”

Pagan snorted. “Yes. I was. That’s how I know.”

But the man didn’t believe him, Pagan could tell.

****

Pagan was sitting with Bixby in a meeting; it was an informal one, dressed up as a dinner among friends. But the talk was all business.

“God, this is boring,” Pagan blurted out, right when George McKinnon was in the middle of hashing out some proposal.

They all stopped and stared at him. They were unsure whether he was there as Bixby’s confidant or plaything, and now he could see them all deciding he was the latter.

Pagan got up, and said to Bixby, “Meet you at the car when you’re done.”

A crease appeared between Bixby’s brow. He had no idea what Pagan was on about. But that was fine. The less he knew, the better.

And then McKinnon scowled: he didn’t like the idea of Pagan leaving, Pagan could tell. If Pagan left, that might prompt Bixby to leave early as well, and he wasn’t done trying to work one over on Bixby yet. Pagan could see the wheels turning in the little man’s mind, trying to think of something that might entice Pagan to stay.

“You might want to stop off in in the library,” McKinnon said. “There’s a rare first edition of Keats in there somewhere.”

Pagan stopped and turned. “Oh, really? All right.” And then he drifted out of the room.

That’s right, just off to do a bit of weeping over "Ode to a Nightingale," Pagan thought, as he stalked down the hall, checking various rooms.

Ah, the study. There it was.  

Pagan went right in and sat at the desk, started going through the files one by one. The glory of it was: he needn’t even hurry. He could sit here at his leisure, check the files one by one. Even if he were to be caught here red-handed, they’d hardly think anything of it, so poorly did they estimate him.

Pagan could not believe his luck. The man had even bought one of those cumbersome copying machines—the sort you saw in offices. Trust McKinnon to be the type to want every new gadget.

Well, it made it convenient as hell for Pagan. Because McKinnon’s files were filled with all sorts of delightful fictions. Even more so than a volume of Keats.

Thursday would definitely be interested in having a look at this.

****

And Pagan—or was he truly Endeavour now?— sometimes he still wasn’t certain—was glad to help.

The man needed protecting from himself.  

Because Pagan was beginning to think, that in many ways—in maybe the most important ways—the man was right and Pagan was wrong.

****

They were driving back from London, and the man turned on the radio. Pagan started singing, just softly under his breath, but then, there was wind in his face and in hair and —why the hell not?—he began to sing louder and louder into the wind, over the roar of the engine, to really tear it up.

The man beside him laughed his warm laugh and said. “You actually sound pretty good: I don’t usually go in for that sort of thing.”

Encouraged by the praise, Pagan widened his eyes and gave the next few stanzas an extra flourish. The man had always claimed to know nothing about music: but he must have had some innate sense of the song: right as Pagan went off on a crescendo, the man hit the gas, as if right on cue, and they were speeding fast as hell and then the trees went by and by and by and by and by

And then Pagan’s head felt heavy. And the man smelled like aftershave and leaves and safety and the man’s shoulder was solid and warm, and—after all—real.

And then it happened.

Pagan closed his eyes and fell asleep.

When Pagan woke, he found that somehow everything had shifted.  The man was so trusting and easily impressed and naïve and Pagan had been trying to help him for his own good.

But somehow, as Pagan slept, the tables had turned: and it was the man who was strong and confident and candid and seemed to know how to live, and it was Pagan who was fractured and lost and confused.

Pagan felt fuzzy at the edges; meanwhile, it seemed as if the man had been growing more and more solid all along.

When Pagan woke, the man said, “I’m not calling you Pagan anymore.”

Just like that. As firm as granite.

And how could Pagan argue? He had wanted the man to take him away from all of them, from all of it. To just take him away.

And with five words and a contraction, Bixby did.

 

And he was Endeavour and he is Endeavour, and he tries to open his eyes and there’s only dark green, like the woods, but they are made of silk.

And Endeavour wants only the thing he wanted the last time he was Endeavour, when he sat at the table, stomach twisting in on itself as Gwen watched him eat, watched him like he was a cuckoo in the nest, taking food from a sweet little robin.

He just wants to go home.

And if he keeps on like this, he never will.

Those numbers. It must have been that the drugs were still too much in his system. That was absolutely daft. There were far too many, for one thing. They could be set in any number of combinations, mean anything at all.

And for another: the painting itself is anachronistic. Would Thursday or Bixby know it’s supposed to be St. Lawrence and St. Francis in the painting? Most likely not. Historically, neither of them would have been at the birth of Christ in 4 BCE or thereabouts.

They both of them think in straight lines and time lines.

“You awake?”

Endeavour realizes that he’s being addressed; that there must be a reason he’s been allowed to regain consciousness.

“Yes,” Endeavour says, uncertainly.

“We’ve got a message we’d like you to deliver. Here, get up.”

It’s a struggle with his hands tied awkwardly behind his back, and he’s half-lugged by unknown hands to his feet. A hand on his shoulder guides him a bit away. He feels the sharpness of a knife to his throat.

“Don’t move,” the man says.

“All right,” Endeavour says, faintly.

“Now I’m going to take your blindfold off—but don’t you dare to turn. Understand?” There’s a slight increase in the pressure in the knife to his throat on the last word.

“Yes,” Endeavour says.

“Good man,” the man says. “Just do what you’re told, and it’ll all be fine. Now I’m going to call Bixby, and when I put the receiver to your ear, I want you to sing this.”

A piece of paper is put in his hand. Fingers tug at the back of his skull, and Endeavour flinches. Then he’s looking at an unremarkable blue wall. He looks down at the paper.

It’s in German. The words are taken from the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Das Rhinegold. They are lines taken from different sections of the opera, all smelted together. It’s the giants singing about their wish for treasure, and Wotan singing, “the ransom lies ready, the gold shall be laid, Freya’s form shall be the measure," and Freya singing, “Do you think me truly worth this ransom?”

They’ll never get this. Bixby will never get this.

“But this is ridiculous,” Endeavour hears himself saying. “The words are all pieced together.”

“We’ve taken a few artistic liberties, of course, but we think it’ll get the message across well enough. Besides, I’ve heard you’re adept at that, switching between tunes. Languages even.”

And at that, Endeavour’s mind goes blank.

Because there was only one time that he. . . 

And they could not. . . .

And even knowing that they know makes him feel infinitely more vulnerable than he did when the knife was at his throat.

And now the man is speaking, and through the phone, he can hear Bixby’s voice, as if from far, far away.

Endeavour wants to grab the phone, to scream, to shout, “It’s the painting for heaven’s sake, that painting is real, it’s real, how can you be so idiotic as to buy such a thing?”

And Bixby would laugh his warm laugh that’s like a sunbeam through a February window, and say, “I bought a real Caravaggio for five hundred francs? Damn, I amaze even myself."

And “Who on earth is Caravaggio?”

But there’s again a knife to his throat and there's a memory of the static, the static he lets remain static between Morse and Pagan, and the static is let loose in his brain and he doesn’t dare.

But maybe he can get away with playing a little dumb. It had worked for him once before.

His German is bad, he’s erratic, he’s a basket case. Actually, at the moment, all of those things are quite true. 

He’ll sing. And in German. But it has to be something more clear than this rubbish for Bixby to puzzle it out. It has to be direct. Like a freight train.

The painting is, first and foremost, a nativity scene.

Endeavour opens his mouth and sings.


	6. Chapter 6

 

Bixby has no idea why the police insist on listening to the recording over and over. What are they hoping to hear? What clues can they possibly derive from it?

He’s not sure he can bear to hear it again.

A junior constable hits the rewind button, and two large reels—strung with tape that looks like shiny brown ribbon—spin counterclockwise. Then he presses a broad green button across the bottom of the control panel. The reels begin to slowly revolve, one feeding tape to the other.

There’s a click from the machine.  

“So, you’re ready, I think, to talk, yes?” says a man in French.

“Yes,” Bixby replies, also in French. “What is it that you want?”

Bixby hates the way his voice sounds on the recording … so calm and cavalier. He used to be proud of the way he could remain unflappable under any circumstance. Now he feels disgusted. Is it possible he has no heart after all? He had often suspected so . . .

“You must know what we want, I think. One cultural treasure for another.” There’s a soft laugh. “Poetic, no? An Italian one for an English one.”

“Italian?” Bixby asks. “Whatever do you mean?”

“You can do better than that, Bix. Just be ready to meet the next time we make contact, if you’re willing to make that exchange. It's your decision.”

Then the man adds in English, “It should not be a difficult endeavour, I hope. Speaking of whom, someone wants to talk to you, I zink.”

“But I don’t . . .”  Bixby begins.

But then the voice, reverting to French, barks, “All right, go! Do it!”

There’s a low intake of breath, and from just the pitch of that brief sound, Bixby knows it’s Endeavour. And then he’s singing:

_“Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht,_

_Alles schläft, einsam wacht.”_

Then there’s a slap and a cry of surprise.

The sound of a tussle and a click.

The phone goes dead.

 

Bixby puts his head in his hands, cards his hands through his hair.

“It’s too late,” he says. “It’s already too late.”

“What do you mean?” says Thursday sharply.

“He’s lost it, he’s gone. That’s obviously not what they wanted him to say. He’s singing “Silent Night” in April. Oh, God.”

“Let’s think about what the man said,” Thursday says bracingly. “Italian. Any idea as to what he might be talking about?”

“No. The only Italian “treasures” I have are Italian shoes,” Bixby says. “I haven’t been to Italy for more than a year.”

And that’s true enough: the second month they were here in the house, Bixby had gone to Florence for a week; he came back only to find Endeavour oddly white-faced. A week or so later, he found a pillow in the corner of his closet.

“What the devil?” Bixby thought.

Then he realized that the closet was about the size of the lake house.

He hadn’t gone on any overnight trips since then, except for the ones in England when Endeavour had his tour. . . .

But . . .

The messenger bag. He bought it at a leather shop in Florence when he was buying his shoes.

“Endeavour’s bag,” he says. “I bought it in Italy.”

“Where is it?” one of the French officers asks.

Bixby leads them back to Endeavour’s study, where a leather messenger bag sits in the chair by his desk.

The French officer begins to rummage through it. Bixby wants to seize it out of the man’s hands. Endeavour is fairly protective over the thing and Bixby hates to watch someone going through it as if Endeavour is no longer due any privacy, as if he’s no longer here.

It’s ridiculous, anyway: no one but he and Endeavour would have known that he bought the bag in Italy, nor is there any chance that Endeavour’s been keeping any Italian “cultural treasures” in it. There’s sure to be only the drafts of an English writer and who knows what other trinkets he’s collected.

The officer pulls out two journals, a few pens, scraps of colorful paper, a smooth stone and two fir cones.

“What’s this, then?” Thursday asks, examining one of the fir cones, perplexed.

Bixby shrugs. “I don’t know. He just picks things up.”

Then Bixby realizes: Maybe he’s been slipping for a while now, possibly all the time he’s known him. After all, the only other Endeavour he’s known is the fascinating wreckage of Pagan.

If Inspector Thursday, who knew him as DC Morse, finds his magpie habits odd, perhaps they really are some sort of symptom—some neurosis he developed afterwards—rather than a harmless quirk.

“Some of the things he does, can be,” Bixby begins, “well, a bit idiosyncratic.”

Thursday huffs a laugh. “You don’t say?”

Bixby isn’t sure what to make of that—perhaps his eccentricity predates his time in prison, then? Perhaps it is just an inherent part of him? Not a sign of mental instability?

But then, what to make of that odd jumble of numbers?

“Those numbers, though, . . . they were just all so meaningless. What if he’s just . . .” Bixby trails off, unable to finish the thought.

Thursday laughs again. “You wait. When you see him, ask him about it. I bet you ten pounds, if you add those numbers up and multiply them by seven, you’ll get the number of half notes in some symphony that was composed in the city he’s being held in. Or something else he would have thought _anyone_ would know.”

Bixby tries to return the man’s smile, but he can’t quite manage it. After all, it was a little more than a year ago that Endeavour spent a week hiding in a closet to sleep; how must he be coping now, having been kidnapped and taken God knows where?

 Bixby doesn’t dare to imagine.

 

****

The troupe of officers clears out just before midnight, leaving two younger constables behind to monitor the phone.

Bixby and the Thursdays go downstairs and talk into the night, sitting at a round wooden table in a small room off of the kitchen. It’s a small space with white washed walls, embroidered sheers at the window, and bunches of lavender hanging upside down from the curtain rod.  Clay pots of tarragon and basil stand about on the floor, where they catch the sun from the high window during the day.

Bixby rarely comes down to this room, but it feels like the right place for a family to keep a vigil. Which, it seems, is what they are now, of sorts, through their link to Endeavour.  And the stove is only a room away, so it’s easy to make a fresh pot of tea when the supply runs low.  

Thursday—no doubt hoping to encourage Bixby by offering him examples of Morse’s ingenuity in getting out of difficult situations—as well as his robust sanity—begins telling tales of his days as a DC.

Bixby can scarcely believe what he hears. It’s like one of those dreams in which you discover your house has a whole different room, one you didn’t even realize was there.

He looks at Mrs. Thursday and realizes that many of the stories are news to her, too.

Perhaps every relationship has its secrets, then?

It’s difficult to imagine Endeavour, his Endeavour, who hid in the woods for months as Pagan and who even now hovers in doorways and keeps an anxious watch over finches, as Thursday’s DC Morse—an Endeavour who felled psychopaths on rooftops, who chased killers through the stacks of the Bodleian, bleeding through his shirt from a knife wound as he ran, who stalked around in the dead of night looking for hidden amphetamines, and who confronted armed gangsters in nightclubs with nothing but some real estate files.

He was a man of action, it seemed. A man who fought for what he believed.

And then he folded it all up and left that world behind.

_After-comers cannot guess the beauty been._

The words float, like snowflakes, unbidden into his mind.

They're the words that were written across the inside of one of the journals Bixby had picked up the first time he had been out at the lake house.

Perhaps Endeavour missed that part of himself, after all?

“I suppose he gave up quite a lot of himself, a lot of what he believed in, when he left the police,” Bixby says.

Thursday senses that Bixby’s feeling maudlin again and hastens to give him a reassuring look.

“I’d say he decided to be where he wants to be,” he says. Then he laughs. “Isn’t as if he didn’t keep a hand in, for old time’s sake. Got us the goods to lead us to George McKinnon, didn’t he?”

Bixby stutters. “What?”

“I came out to the car one morning, and there it was on the seat: a fat pile of documents full of all sorts of telling discrepancies.”

“He can’t have done,” Bixby begins . . . but. . .

But then, Bixby remembers an afternoon long ago in Oxford.

****

“I wish you’d come up with me to this dinner, old man.”

Endeavour split another log in half, then stood and considered him. “Why?”

“It’s this Henry Rose fellow. I’ve done a bit of business with him, and he’s been after me like a goddamn hound to come and listen to a proposal some associate of his has hashed out. A George McKinnon. I don’t know. . . something about the whole thing feels a bit off. I wonder what you might think of it all.”

Endeavour laughed. “Why would you ask me about such things?”

“You have a good sense of people. Have a good sense, I think, about whom to trust.”

Endeavour raised his eyebrows. “Nothing easier in the world that that. I know who and who not to trust because I don’t trust anybody.”

“That’s not true, surely,” Bixby said. “You trust me, at least.”

Endeavour twisted his mouth, as if to say that were a matter still under consideration.  


“Well, I trust you, and that’s what important in this matter. So, I’ll swing by at eight, then.” He turned to go back to his car before Endeavour could have the chance to say no.

“Alright,” Endeavour said, and Bixby heard another log split behind him. He had his hand on the car handle when Endeavour called after him.

“But you can’t call me Endeavour in front of all of those people, did you know? You can’t call me it in front of anyone.”

Bixby stopped for a moment. “Why on earth not?” he said.

“I’m . . . I’m not really used to it.”

“Alright,” Bixby said.

 

As soon as McKinnon got up to get the decanter of brandy, Endeavour turned to him and rolled his eyes melodramatically.

Well, Bixby thought, that confirms it. It seemed like an awfully lot of money could be made, but it also sounded a bit too good to be true.  


As Endeavour had just verified.

Bixby would have thought that, once he had given his opinion, that would be that. But, no. Endeavour barely managed to control his face throughout the rest of the evening. Bixby wished he’d turn it down a notch; he might not be interested in this deal, but there was no reason to burn bridges altogether.

He would have thought Endeavour would have had a tad more self-control. Inspector Thursday had confirmed that he had been a police officer, even though Endeavour rarely spoke of it. Didn’t he have to maintain some sort of poker face when questioning suspects? Wasn’t he obligated to be fair and impartial, consider people innocent until proven guilty?

Or maybe that had been their shtick: there had to be some degree of showmanship to police work after all. Perhaps Inspector Thursday sat stern and silent, while Endeavour unnerved the suspect with flagrant displays of incredulity? Rolling his eyes to the heavens as if to ask for patience, raising his eyebrows in that manner that furrowed his brow into ripples and widened his large blue eyes to the extent that it would be impossible to lie while looking into them?

That could be it.

Then, to top it all off, right when McKinnon was in the middle of a sentence, he blurted out, “God, this is boring!”

Bixby was stunned. It was as if he was quite possessed.

He pushed his chair back and got up from the table. “Meet you out at the car when you’re done,” he said, sailing off without a word of parting to anyone, as if his head was a million miles away.

McKinnon called after him, told him about some book in the library. Endeavour turned, gave one last imperious look, and wandered off down the hall.

But once Bixby left the dinner, Endeavour was already out in the car, looking . . . self-satisfied?

“What was all that about?” Bixby asked.

“What was all what about?” Endeavour said.

 

He couldn’t have . . . Bixby thinks. Or could he have?

 

“Are you sure the papers were from Endeavour?” Bixby asks.

Thursday smiles. “Fairly certain, son. I don’t know anyone else that would give me a file flagged with a note in Greek _. “Something to read with your ham and tomato.”_ Signed with an E.”

“Ham and tomato?” Bixby asks. “What on earth does that mean?”

Mr. and Mrs. Thursday both laugh.

“You boys shouldn’t tease me so about that,” Mrs. Thursday says.

She turns to Bixby and says, “Back when Sam was a baby and Joan was still in diapers, I got so discouraged—I felt like all I did was run about all day long just to end up where I started. So, my grandmother gave me some advice: she suggested I make a schedule for myself—tackle different tasks on each day of the week.”  

“Then, I started doing the same thing with Fred’s sandwiches. In the mornings, I had been stumbling about in a fog—neither Sam nor Joan were good sleepers—and I realized I had been making Fred the same lunch day in and day out. So, I began trying to switch it up a bit: and, to remember, I started making him a different sandwich for every day of the week: Monday, cheese and pickle, Tuesday, luncheon meat, like that.”

“Morse picked up on the pattern,” Thursday explains, “And we made a sort of game of it—he’d tell me what I had for lunch before I had a chance to unwrap it from the wax paper. Morse left the files on a Thursday—the “ham and tomato” comment was his way of letting me know they were from him, I suppose.”

Bixby smiles as the older couple look at one another and laugh companionably; and then, he’s immediately reminded of something—his suits hung out for him in the morning, a different ensemble for every day of the week.

Bixby had never quite understood this—it was a domestic touch fairly uncharacteristic of Endeavour.

But now he can’t help but wonder. Bixby lost both of his parents before he was sixteen, but he was left with the indelible memory of their love for one another and the certainty that they had loved—even adored—him.

Endeavour’s childhood, from what he’s gleaned, sounds as if it had been a largely grim affair—hardly filled with role models for happy relationships. Is he looking to the Thursdays for clues on how it’s done? In lieu of first-hand experience, has he made them a sort of guidebook?

He’s almost ready to tell the Thursdays about the suits, but stops. He’s afraid they might laugh. And the whole idea makes Bixby feel almost as if he could cry.

“I’ve just had a thought,” Mrs. Thursday says.

“What is it, love?” Thursday asks.

“Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?” she asks. Then she looks to Bixby.  “'Silent Night.' Is there something that happened at Christmas that he wants you to remember?”

“That might be a little too obvious. This is Morse, after all,” Thursday says, but Bixby can tell he’s considering the idea.

“No,” Mrs. Thursday protests “People do change. He’s been here, what, more than two years now? Maybe he’s figured out that not everyone is . . . . well, that not everyone is like him.”

Bixby casts his mind back to last Christmas, but all that surfaces are bits of memory, like the flashes of sun on a frozen pond.

******

“You never had a Christmas tree growing up? Not even when you lived with your mother?”

“Quakers don’t really go in for that sort of thing. Every day is a holy day.”

Endeavour stood on the other side of the tree as he spoke, clipping on a light.

 It was odd seeing his face thus, framed through the branches. There was a time when Bixby had stalked through the woods with an almost primal urgency, seeking out a glimmer of Pagan’s pale, fey face through the trees. To see him now, his face obscured by greenery, but softly lit from the glow of Christmas lights, was an altogether different experience.  

“What do you mean?” Bixby asked.

“Every day is sacred, so they don’t go in for making a fuss about Christmas. The idea is, you are supposed to be grateful for every day,” he said. “Although, my mother was a bit of a rebel. On Christmas, she used to make a cake for after meeting. And she put berry juice in the icing to make it pink.”

“Oh, gracious,” Bixby laughed.

Endeavour nodded.  “That was pretty decadent in her book.” Then he smiled. “And she always made it in the shape of a rectangle so it could be “divided equally.”  

He laughed again softly, and then went back to untangling the next light on the strand.

*****

The night of Endeavour’s choir’s concert was clear and crisp, and so they decided to walk down to the village.

They were in the woods on their way home, when Endeavour asked, “Did you hear the Soviets discovered a new comet?”

“Oh, yes, I did read that,” Bixby said.

“I wonder if you can see it?” Endeavour mused.

Bixby scanned the skies. The stars were bright and sharp in the way that they are only in December.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Bixby didn’t know what got into him, but suddenly he said,  “It’s odd, isn’t it, to think that all of this time, it’s been circling though the solar system, alone and unseen? It makes you wonder if it could have been said to exist at all, considering that it’s been completely outside of all consciousness.”

Endeavour stopped and looked at him. “You know,” he said, “that’s what I thought, too.”

Bixby knew he should admit that he knew as much—that he had heard him say much the same thing to Bruce at breakfast all those years ago. I was eavesdropping, he should have said, because I already adored you.

But Endeavour was looking at him in wonder, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he found someone who understood him. And somehow, Bixby couldn’t bring himself to disavow him of the notion.

He really was a phony bastard.

 “Where on earth are your gloves?” Bixby asked, casting about guiltily for a change of subject.  “Why don’t you ever wear them?”

“Oh, it’s fine. I never get cold.”

Bixby took his hand and held it. Even through his glove, he could tell it was like ice.

“Maybe you never get cold because you go straight to numb,” Bixby huffed. He tucked Endeavour’s hand inside of his pocket, warming it next to is. 

As they walked on, Bixby realized that perhaps he hadn’t dissembled at all; perhaps he really did mean what he had said.

After all, could you really say that Joss Bixby truly existed, before Endeavour was there to see that he did?

******

Bixby remembers searching for Endeavour’s face among the faces of the choir, listening for his laugh amidst the noise of a party, and taking his hand in his pocket as they stood under a winter sky.

But he couldn’t remember anything about last Christmas that would shed any light on where Endeavour might be now.

All that he knew was that every day had been a holy day, that he held a warming hand in the place where he once kept a gold gambling chip, and that he had not been alone.

 

 

********************

“Don’t turn your head! Don’t you dare!” says the man with the Italian accent.

It’s more easily said than done. Having been smacked across the face, Endeavour’s first impulse is to turn to look at his assailant, to keep him in sight. But, instead, he forces himself to freeze, to remain absolutely still.

He knows, instinctively, that the fact that he has never seen his captors’ faces gives them all the more reason to let him go in the end.

The man steps up behind him and draws the scarf around his eyes. Again, the world is dark green, like the woods, but made of silk.

Someone is clutching his arm and there’s a sting, and then muffled voices that sound as if they are coming from far away, like through a radio.

“What do you think that meant? Silent Night?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. We’re leaving anyway.”

Then it feels as if he is floating through the air, then he’s on something hard and smooth, then there’s the sound of a slam, like the close of the boot of a car.

And it’s cold. And he lies there for a long while, it seems, while it grows colder and colder.

And then he’s numb and he’s drifting.

*****

Pagan never knew such cold as he did that winter. He thought he would have been used to it, having grown up in an old house up north that was often heated only by wood fire.

But it was a different kind of coldness that gripped him that winter: the life he had found at Oxford, the one he had longed for for so many years, felt as if it were coming to a close.

Everyone seemed at odds with one another. Tony seemed restless, Kay, impatient.

Bruce and Susan were whispering off in corners one moment and quarreling the next. Something was odd there. Once, Pagan was just coming around the landing to go up to Professor Morrow’s rooms when he heard them on the stairs. He stopped, unabashedly, and listened, but all Susan was saying was that Bruce should put more pressure on his parents to give him access to his trust fund.

“You’re twenty, for heaven’s sake,” she said.

“I told you: my father told me from the beginning I couldn’t touch it until I was twenty-one.”

So. Just posh people talk. Pagan had no knowledge of trust funds and therefore no opinion one way or another. Nor could he could imagine why Susan would care.

Meanwhile, Bunny was in an awful state. He seemed to be angry about something, which wasn’t like him at all.

Once night, just when it seemed things might be righting themselves, Henry and Bunny had a drawn-out fight over dinner, about whether Roman soldiers stood two feet apart or shoulder to shoulder. It went on for more than an hour, and they both seemed to get more emotional over the topic than the discussion warranted.

“Why on earth does it matter?” Pagan finally snapped. “They are all of them dead anyway.”

They looked at him as if had gone quite barmy.

****

One night, there was a sharp banging on Pagan’s door. He looked at his clock. It was two in the morning. He got up from his rumpled bed and went to the door, opening it blearily.

It was Bunny.

“Siegfried, old sport. You have to let me hide here. Marion is on the warpath.”

He barged in to the room and went over to Pagan’s desk, throwing himself into the chair with such abandon that it creaked beneath him.

“Why?” Pagan asked. “What did you do?”

Bunny ran his hands through his hair. He looked quite deranged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve been in a state, old sport. Marion’s ready to have my head over it.”

“You have been sort of snappy lately,” Pagan ventured.

“What do you mean? What would _you_ know about anything?” he snapped.

“Don’t get offended,” Pagan said. “I was only trying to help.”

There was a sharp knock on the door. “Hide me!” Bunny whispered harshly. “Don’t tell her I’m here. I just don’t want to talk just now. I just can’t talk to anyone.” And, with that, he dove into the space between Pagan’s bed and his desk.

Pagan answered the door. Marion stood there in a blouse and tweed skirt, as prim as a matron twenty years her senior.

“Is Bunny here?” she asked.

 “No,” Pagan said, and swallowed.

Marion considered him.

“Bunny!” she announced over his shoulder, to the room at large. “I’m going home now.” She checked her tasteful little watch. “I’ll expect you in front of my building in twenty minutes. I want to talk to you.”

And then she left.

Bunny peeked out from behind the bed.

“Well, I’m certainly not going,” he said. “I don’t think I should let her assume I’ll hop whenever she calls, don’t you?”

“I suppose not,” Pagan said cautiously. He had never quite understood their relationship, and didn’t feel at any rate that he was one to offer advice.

He twirled about for a while in Pagan’s chair. Pagan got back into bed, leaning against the pillows, while Bunny absentmindedly picked up Pagan’s books from his desk, thumbed through them and put them back in the wrong place.  There was a long silence. Once, Pagan nearly fell asleep, his head falling forward and then jerking back up with a snap.

“Well,” Bunny sighed after a while. “I suppose I might as well get the tongue-lashing over with.”

“I suppose,” Pagan said.

“Night, Siegfried,” he said, as he closed the door.

“Good night,” Pagan said.

 

At breakfast, Pagan was mulling over what must be troubling Bunny when Susan came up behind him and pulled up a chair.

“I was thinking we should all go on a trip this Christmas,” she said. “Everyone has been in such a bad mood. It’s getting really tiresome.”

Pagan was thinking that wouldn’t be a bad idea; he certainly didn’t look forward to a Christmas at his father’s house. He was thinking the seaside, perhaps, or maybe they’d just all go to Tony’s aunt’s again. They hadn’t been for months, and Pagan missed the place.

“Where were you thinking?” he asked.

“Argentina,” she said.

Pagan swallowed his tea the wrong way and had to cough. “Argentina?” he asked. “What would we possibly do in Argentina?”

“C’mon, Devvy, it will be an adventure.”

“But isn’t it awfully expensive?”  

Susan laughed her laugh that sounded like her hands trailing up and down the piano keys. “Not at all. It’s cheap, Argentina. You could live the whole rest of your life there with about 100,000 pounds.”

Oh, is that all? Pagan thought. But he said nothing, thoughtfully chewing on a corner of his toast.

“Stop that,” Susan said.

“Stop what?”

“I know what you’re thinking. Stop being so middle-class. I can pay for you. You’ll have the whole rest of our lives to pay me back, alright?”

Pagan hummed noncommittally. It wasn’t as if there weren't other flaws in her plan. “But wouldn’t I need a passport?” Pagan asked.

“I can get you one pretty quickly. Bruce knows all sorts of people to get things like that done in a snap.”

“But to get a passport, wouldn’t I need my birth certificate?” Pagan asked. He could just imagine his father’s face when he asked him for it, especially if he were to mention that he needed it so that he could get a passport. To go to South America for Christmas of all things.

_“What do you need a passport for? I never had such a thing. What? All of Britain not good enough for you?”_

But Susan smiled her bright smile and pulled out a piece of paper with a flourish, holding it up in front of his face.

Pagan looked at it in shock.

“Where did you get this?” he asked. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He felt as if all of the air were going out of the room.

“Drove up to Lincolnshire,” she said proudly. “Your old man sure is a sour bastard, no wonder you never talk about him.”

Pagan’s mind was spinning—imaging Susan and his father in any conversation at all entailed a leap of the imagination that Pagan felt was utterly beyond him. The collision of two points that didn’t exist on the same plane.

Although, if anyone were to be a match for his father. . .

Susan pulled out two cardstock rectangles from her coat— two plane tickets.

“Merry Christmas!” she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

Pagan looked at the tickets, and flipped them over, confused. 

“Well, what’s the matter? Aren’t you happy? You’ve probably never been on a plane, have you?”

“No,” Pagan admitted, “but . . . “

Susan sighed, “But what?”

“But . . . these are only good for flying to Buenos Aires.”

“Yes?” Susan said.

“Don’t we need tickets to get back to England?”

Susan laughed. “That’s not how it works. We’ll pick up the return tickets at the airport there.”

“Oh,” Pagan said.

Susan hopped up from the table, grabbed her books, and swooped down to kiss him again. As she was leaving she stopped and turned, “Oh, Devvy, one other thing. We’re not really mentioning it to Bunny.”

“Why?”

“We don’t really want him to come. He’s been sort of bitchy lately, hasn’t he?”

“I suppose,” Pagan said.

 

A few days later, Bruce came up to him in the library.

“I wouldn’t mention Susan’s Argentina thing anymore,” he said. “I don’t think it’s going to work.”

It seemed sort of cryptic to Pagan, but then again, a lot of what they said sounded cryptic to Pagan. That was how fashionable people were: they put on clothes and trips and people and took them off again.

“Alright,” Pagan said.

So, Argentina was off, but then he was going to go to Susan’s for Christmas. Then, suddenly, that was off, too. “You know how my mother can be,” Susan lamented.

And that was that.

And then, to make matters even more bewildering: suddenly Bunny and Henry, who had been bickering for weeks, were going off on a tour of Italy together over the holiday.

Pagan wasn’t sure what to do. He never quite knew what to make of Susan’s plans for South America, but one thing he did know for certain: there was no way he could survive the holidays with his father and Gwen.

The dorm in which he stayed would be closed over the hols; the university didn’t want to pay to heat the empty rooms.

Pagan cast about for a place to stay, and eventually heard of a former medieval studies student who had an old warehouse where he made replicas of instruments from the middle ages. He had a room on the top floor where a student could stay for free in exchange for helping out around the shop.

James gave Pagan a trial, instructing him on how to use a jigsaw to cut out the body of a lute. Once he deemed Pagan’s work satisfactory, he took him up to see the room.

The first thing Pagan noticed was that it was snowing. He looked up: there was a large hole in the ceiling, revealing a black sky full of stars.

***

At first, it was just a tingling, then a numbness in his fingers that wouldn’t go away. It made it difficult to work with the wood, to cut the delicate designs that James demanded.

James came to the warehouse each morning dressed in warm wool and wearing gloves with the finger tips cut out. When he heard the shop opening, Pagan would stumble down the steps, his skin chilled as if he were encased in a thin layer of frost. 

Then, it seemed as if the cold settled in his chest. And then it settled somewhere in his brain. He felt as if he traveled through a fog, through a mist made of sparks of stinging ice.

“You’ve got to get your head out of the clouds, man,” James said, whenever Pagan fumbled and dropped a piece of wood.

But his head was not in the clouds; it was in the stars, where he swam at night, looking through the hole in his ceiling.

One night, after James had left, and a few hours after he had been watching the stars and snow fall through the roof, Pagan suddenly felt the urge to go for a walk. It was as if some primal instinct had kicked in; suddenly he knew that if he didn’t start moving, the frost that seemed to cover his skin might harden to the point that he might never move again.

He wandered around Oxford: it was late, and everything was closed. Pagan wondered idly if perhaps it was Christmas.  

Soon, he realized that there was nothing else for it; there was nothing else to do but go home.

When he returned to his room, the first thing he noticed was a glowing red spark in the darkness. It was the tip of a lighted cigarette. A figure turned in the shadows. Pagan perhaps should have been startled by a stranger lurking in his room, but by then, he was too numb to care.

The figure snapped on a light on the desk.

It was Henry. For a long moment, he stood there, his face aghast.

“Pagan?” he asked incredulously.

And then the world went black.  

When he woke, he was staring through the hole in the ceiling, up at the stars. Henry was holding a cloth to the side of his head. His head felt warm and sticky and wet. It was an odd feeling, the warmth.

“Nice little place I got here, isn’t it?” Pagan asked.

Henry looked up, to where large flakes drifted down from the sky.

“Yes,” he said. “Not unlike the Parthenon.”

*******

“What did you do, you idiots? He’s like ice.”

“We hid him in the boot of the car. Guess it got kind of cold at night. We didn’t want anyone to see us bring him into the house.”  

“The phones are no good—Phillipe says they are tapping the line. We’ll have to put the specifics in a letter.”

“What should we set for the date?”

“The fifteenth? It’ll take the letter two, three days to get there, tops. And that would give Bixby another day to figure out how to transport the thing.”

“Let’s get him cleaned up a bit; he’s looking pretty much the worse for wear. I just want the painting, I don’t want to give Bix any cause for hard feelings. He’s usually a pretty easy-going bastard, but . . .”

Then, suddenly, someone is shaking his shoulder.

Henry? he wonders.

“Hey. Hey, Morse, can you hear me?”

“Hmmmmmmm?”

“Come on,” a voice says. Someone is tapping him lightly on the face. It stings worse than such tapping warrants.  

“Come on. Morse?”

“Jesus, how much did you give him? He doesn’t exactly seem to weigh a ton.”

“Morse!”

 “Hmmmmm?”

“Get up, come on.”

He’s being lifted to his feet. He stumbles forward. Someone is at his wrists, undoing the ropes that bind them. He moves his arms, and, for a moment, there’s such a burn at his shoulders that he feels his knees might buckle. But then, the pain sharpens and has the opposite effect: brining his muzzy brain back into clarity.

Then he’s being shoved in through a door, something soft is being placed in his hands. “You’ve got twenty minutes,” a voice says. A door is closed behind him, locks with a click.

He’s realizes he’s alone. He tucks what he’s holding in the crook of one arm and uses the other hand to lift the blindfold. He’s in a large bathroom: white and seafoam green. There are silver faucets with swans on them, and a white chair filled with fluffy seafoam green and pastel blue towels.

He looks down to what he’s holding and is momentarily stunned: it’s his own clothes, the ones he fell asleep in as he sat out on the porch: black dress pants, white Oxford shirt, blue half-zip jumper and a blue tie.

Then what the . . . .?

He looks down at himself: he’s in somebody else’s white vest and baggy pajama bottoms.

Well. That’s certainly annoying as hell.

He should be unnerved, he knows. For how long has he been dressed like a doll, shuffled around like a parcel?

He looks in the mirror: his face is covered with gold stubble. Maybe a week? Nothing hurts anywhere, except his shoulders, and the muscle in his upper arm, where he’s been injected with god-knows what… and his wrists, which are still pretty raw and scabbed. He must have been struggling with his bonds all of the while and simply doesn’t remember.

He starts up the shower, strips off and steps into the spray. The warm water feels glorious over his aching muscles. He’s stiff, as if he’s barely moved all week.

But then he hasn’t, hasn't he? He’s just been moved about. Like a doll. Like a parcel.

_“If you don’t use your name, someone else will go ahead and choose a name for you."_

As the water falls, it sounds like rain, and rain sounds like memories: and suddenly, he does remember more about the week then he ever would have imagined. He’s been living in memories, in a dark forest that’s made of green silk.

And he blinks, and he’s Endeavour and he’s standing at a door, a suitcase in his hand, sinking beneath the weight of Gwen’s scowl.

And then he’s kneeling behind a woodpile, and he’s Morse.

He’s Morse, and Bruce is laughing. Bruce says, “If he doesn’t have a Christian name, then he must be a Pagan.”

And Pagan shuts the door on a room scattered with records and he’s running down the stairs of his building to catch the bus to basic training. "Name?" the sergeant standing by the bus says. And Pagan says, "Morse." 

Morse puts on a pair of headphones and listens to numbers reel off in Russian. He doesn’t talk to anyone and no one talks to him.

And Thursday is dying and Morse is shouting, “You bastard! You bastard!”

Two guards lead him to a room where there’s a man and a desk and a phone. He picks the phone up and says, “Tony? It’s Pagan.”

And he wakes up in a car and he doesn't know quite where he is and a man is saying, “I’m not calling you Pagan anymore.”

He’s holding a letter and a man is saying, “You’re all right, Endeavour,” and he says, “Don’t!”

He’s Endeavour and his world is green silk.

And he’s Endeavour and his name has been changed more times than he can remember. But nothing changes.

 

His life has never been his own; he’s forever been at the mercy of the four winds.  

It’s as if he’s spent his whole life in hiding—first, there were all of those empty years in Lincolnshire, when he hid in his room, trying to stay out of sight, laying low as his father and Gwen rowed downstairs. Even his greatest act of rebellion had been to slip out of the window at four in the morning to walk to the bus station, quietly, in the dark.

At Oxford, he had let himself be renamed immediately, without giving it a second thought. And then, he spent the remaining years struggling to figure out his place among those who had named him. He was always hiding behind a book, or in the daydream world of his records, it seemed, while they were busy living—while they loved and quarreled, plotted and laughed, wept and stormed.

He knew he would never fully be one of them, but, nevertheless, he would have followed them anywhere, so pathetically grateful he was for having been claimed.

As he stood in the middle of Bixby’s front hall at that last party in Oxford, a cold gun pressed to his temple, all he could think of was the feel of the cardstock tickets to Buenos Aires that he had once held in his hand. It was a shock to realize how close he had been to becoming an accessory to murder, albeit after the fact. For he knew now, what he had not gleaned then: there was a reason that the tickets were good for only one way, rather than for a round trip.

They were never intending on coming back.

And not one of them thought to let him in on that fact. None of them seemed to think he might want to have any say in the matter.

 

And then, there were his years as a detective constable: all that running. He was never acting; always reacting—struggling to decipher Gull’s anagrams, Deare’s doubletalk, Val Todd’s threats.

He was always one step behind, fighting to keep up with more cunning, more dangerous and more ill-intended men. He was never able to eradicate any of their deeds; no matter how hard he ran, he was only ever able to minimize the damage they wreaked.

It was always somebody else who held the cards.

 

And even in his affair with Bixby, how had he acted any differently?

It was funny that Bixby claimed never to have read Shakespeare, other than the ubiquitously assigned Julius Caesar, because Endeavour recognizes now the tactic: Bixby could have ripped a page right from Petruchio’s guidebook— that whole summer was like something right out of The Taming of the Shrew.

And Pagan said go to hell and Bixby smiled as if he had said the most charming thing.

_“Say she rail; why, I'll tell her plain_  
_She sings as sweetly as a nightingale._  
_Say that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear_  
_As morning roses newly wash'd with dew._

 

Who was Endeavour but an exhausted Pagan, a Pagan who finally folded his lousy hand of cards?

Pagan said it was the moon and Bixby said no, it’s the sun so many times that Pagan couldn’t keep up. Said fine, then, it’s the sun.

And in the end, he had done the same thing he had almost done with Susan all those years ago—followed him blindly to another country with nothing but a suitcase. It was actually even more foolhardy, what he had done: he had at least met Susan’s parents, knew who and what she was.

Whereas, in Bixby’s case, he had plenty of reasons to doubt that Joss Bixby was even his real name.

And yet Bixby had named him fast enough.

_Good morrow, Endeavour—for that’s your name, I hear._

 

_Well have you heard, but something hard of hearing. They call me Pagan that do talk of me._

 

_You lie in faith, for you are called Endeavour_

_And bonny Endeavour and sometimes Endeavour the curst._

And again, he accepted it. Like a doll. Like a parcel. 

It wasn't as if he hadn't had ample chances to learn by then not to expect anything else. 

But perhaps there was something different there. Because one night, Pagan stood on a dock and Bixby said, “on a night like this, a man might believe anything is possible.”

And he said it with such disarming sincerity—almost as if he were apologizing for not being smug bastard that Pagan had so firmly assumed he was—that it made Pagan believe, for the first time since he was twelve, that it just might be true.

*****

Bixby makes his own luck.  If he’s losing, he bluffs. If he’s losing, he switches tactics without ever showing his hand.

Bixby always holds all the cards. And he always wins.

And Endeavour will have to learn to do the same.

Bixby thinks the painting he bought is worthless, a copy. He doesn’t know that the painting is what this has all been about.

And if he doesn’t know the purpose of the game, he won’t even begin to be able to play. There has to be a way to let him know that crucial information, at least.

But how to do that?

Endeavour turns off the shower and goes over to the sink. He’s surprised they’ve allowed him a razor. He lathers up his face, and with each stroke of the razor, he’s watching his face in the mirror, and it’s coming slowly, slowly into focus. It’s amazing, he realizes, that he’s able to do such a meticulous job when so many thoughts are circling like birds through his mind.

He rinses his face and begins to dress. Once he’s back in his own clothes, he feels like himself again.

Himself, that is, with a slight edge of Bixby.

There’s a voice at the door, but he doesn’t hear it. He’s looking in the mirror, looking to see if there is some trace of Bixby confidence in his eyes. They won’t see it of course, once he’s blindfolded, but that’s no matter: he will know that it’s there.

When the door opens, he turns.

And he’s looking right into the face of a man with dark hair and a neat dark beard and furious brown eyes.

The man smacks him hard across the face, wheeling him around.

“I told you to turn away from the door and stay put,” he shouts.

“I didn’t hear you,” Endeavour says.

There’s a hand clutching the hair at the back of his head and, in one deft movement, his world is again dark green silk.

He’s shoved down a hall and into another room and pushed down on a sofa.

“Little bastard looked right at me,” the man with the Italian accent says. “I told you that was not worth the risk.”

“What the hell did you to do his face?” the other man says. “That completely defeated the purpose. This is a game we want, not a war.”

“Well, he sure got a good look at me, so. . . ,” the Italian says angrily. “And if I go, don’t think I won’t take you with me. That was all your doing.”

Endeavour’s mind is still reeling.

“It doesn’t matter,” he shouts, cutting them both off. “You’ll eventually have to kill me. Because he’s never going to give you that painting.”

There is silence, and a tension in the air. Endeavour can’t see the men, but he can tell his words have had an effect, that they are stunned, perhaps, that he has spoken at all. It’s the only coherent thing he can remember saying to them all this while.

“Oh?  And why is that?”  the second man asks, his voice deadly quiet.

“He’s angry with me. We had a huge row and he kicked me out of the house. Why do you think I was sleeping on the porch?” Endeavour says.  

There’s another pause.

“I did think that was odd, Luc. It was almost too easy,” says the man with the Italian accent.

“Shut up. And don’t say my name.”

“If you let me write something to him, it might change his mind,” Endeavour casts about wildly. “I used to write him letters all the time; if he sees my handwriting, he might get sentimental and change his mind.”

“Why would you want to help us?” the man who must be called Luc asks.

Endeavour snorts at this. “I would have thought that would be obvious, wouldn’t it? I want to go home.”

“Maybe it’s such not such a bad idea. It couldn’t hurt. We’re getting ready for the drop off anyway,” the Italian says. “Bixby didn’t sound all that enthusiastic on the phone, really.”

The man who must be called Luc huffs a laugh. “That’s Bix. He can be as smooth as glass when he wants. He’s not about to show his hand.”

“You sure about that?”

There’s a silence.

“It’s up to you,” Endeavour says, as if he couldn’t care less, even though he feels his heart hammering in his chest. “It depends on how badly you want the painting. You could either go down in history as pulling off one of the most flagrant art heists of all time, or you can just kill me and toss me in a ditch like a pair of unimaginative low-class thugs.”

Another silence. 

“All right,” Luc says, finally. “All right, fine. One sentence.”

He hears the man get up, and then he jumps as someone grabs at his hand. Then, he realizes he’s being handed a pen. His hand is guided to a piece of paper that’s on top of something hard, like a book.

“Keep it simple. One sentence.  Just a nice little apology, all right sweetheart?”

Endeavour scowls, tightening the band of dark green silk. “You needn’t be so condescending,” he says.

And then he writes one sentence: 

_Forgive my cross words. Love, E_

 


	7. Chapter 7

 Chapter 7

 

The police manage to trace the telephone call to a five-block area of Nancy, but by the time they zero in on the right house, Endeavour and his captors have once again disappeared.

The junior constables keep their vigil by the telephone, but in the end, a letter from the kidnappers arrives by post.

The letter comes mixed up in a pile of business correspondence, and, as there’s no return address, Bixby, at first, is puzzled. But, once he’s opened the letter, he realizes at once what it is—Endeavour’s captors are making their full demands at last.

Bixby looks at the note. It’s fairly straightforward. He’s supposed to bring the “item in question” to an address in Lamarche on the night of the fifteenth.  

There’s a warning not to tell the police about the note, and to make sure, on the night that he comes, that he isn’t followed—not if he ever wants to see Endeavour alive again.

At the bottom, in Endeavour’s handwriting, is one sentence. It’s slanted strangely upwards. Bixby’s not sure what to make of that.

 

He goes into the dining room, where the Thursdays are having tea, and gives them a silent nod. “Would you come with me to my study for a moment?” he asks. “There’s something I was hoping to show you.”

Bixby has made his decision: he doesn’t want the constables to overhear anything.

Once he closes the door of his study, he shows the Thursdays the letter.

“Forgive my cross words?” Mrs. Thursday asks. “He never seemed angry to me. Can you remember what he might have said? What he might be talking about?”

“No,” Bixby says, shaking his head.

In fact, it’s just the opposite—during the time when Endeavour seemed upset with him, he scarcely spoke at all—he only rewound back into a wary and reproachful Pagan. Not that he wants to disclose that whole episode to the Thursdays.

Besides, Bixby has a more pressing worry. “Why are his words slanted like that?” he asks. He still can’t help but wonder how Endeavour is bearing up under the strain of it all. “What do you think is the matter with him?”

“Nothing,” says Thursday. “He’s blindfolded.”

He says it with such professional assurance that Bixby is heartened. “Ah,” he says.

He’s been lucky to have had the Thursdays here though all of this. It was the Inspector, after all, who had first figured out that something was amiss, noting the scratches on the red Jag.

Poor things. It hasn’t been much of a second honeymoon for them. They’ve had their first spoilt by a world war, their second by a local kidnapping. The continent had not been kind to them. Bixby would have to put them on a cruise sometime, to make it up to them.

_Forgive my cross words._

What can that mean?  

Bixby says the words to himself, and when he does, the accents fall on completely different syllables than when he says them aloud.  

Suddenly, he has a vision of himself, standing next to Endeavour’s nightstand, which is piled high with arts and entertainment sections taken from Bixby’s newspapers.

 

_“Aren’t there any of these you can manage to part with?” he says._

_“They help me think in French,” Endeavour answers._

 

Growing up, Bixby never would have said “cross” for angry. Growing up, “cross” would have been “mad” and “mad” would have been “crazy.”

 When Bixby says the words to himself, he hears, “Forgive my crosswords.”

 

It isn’t until he hears the Thursdays laugh that he realizes he has said the words out loud.

“Told you he’s learning, didn’t I?” Mrs. Thursday says.

Bixby smiles, then gestures for the Thursdays to follow him.

“Shouldn’t we show the letter to the constables?” Mrs. Thursday asks, as they go to the door.

Bixby has just started to open it, but now he closes it again.

“No,” he says.

“Whyever not?” she asks.

“One of them is a plant,” Bixby says. “One of them must be working for whoever has Endeavour. It’s a bit too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? He keeps disappearing, it seems, whenever the police seem close to finding him.”

Thursday raises an eyebrow and nods sagely, as if he’s impressed.  Bixby nods again to the door, and they file out, quietly.

It’s funny how a crisis can change priorities: when he first heard the Thursdays had accepted Endeavour’s invitation, he wondered how they might react to their living arrangements, once they were made so flagrantly obvious. Giving them rooms at the other end of the house seemed the perfect solution—keeping his and Endeavour’s relationship discreet, while at the same time giving the Thursdays the sense of freedom to come and go as they pleased, to let them use the place as a springboard for whatever "romantic getaway"  side trips they’d like to take on their own.

And likewise, last week, when Thursday had come to find Bixby to tell him about the scratches on the car, he had hovered respectfully out in the hallway.

Now, after Endeavour’s been missing for a week, when Bixby goes into their room, the Thursdays file in right behind him without a second thought, curious as to what he has in mind.

Bixby feels a tinge of compunction; due to Endeavour’s untidy habits, it’s fairly obvious the room is a shared space.

 _Gee whiz, Endeavour,_ he thinks, in some corner of his mind, the part that just can’t seem to stop making childish jokes, _I think your mom and dad are on to us._

Well. Be that as it may. After all, it wasn’t as if he harboured for an instant the notion that it's the shock Endeavour might have suspected it would be.

Bixby heads straight to Endeavour’s nightstand and sinks onto the side of the bed, gathering the newspapers into his hand. The papers are in French, so he’s got about fifteen or twenty puzzles on the go at once.

Endeavour’s French is perhaps more precise than Bixby’s grammatically, but Bixby has always been a natural mimic and is much more fluent, has a much better accent. Which, in France, counts for a lot. Endeavour’s French is halting and rounded—carrying, strangely, much more Lincolnshire than his English does.

As Bixby rifles through the puzzles, though, he realizes the flaw in the plan. His French may be better than Endeavour’s, yes . . .

But he’s terrible at these sorts of puzzles. He hates them: all the double entendre and ridiculous puns and esoteric facts. They’re all pointless, a pointless waste of time.

And there are fifteen of them, at least. Maybe even twenty or twenty-one.

How can he be expected to find the clue in all of these?

“Oh, God,” he says, his bubble of elation popping in an instant. “Why would he do this to me? He knows I’m rubbish at this.”

“We’ll just have to take them one at a time,” Thursday says reassuringly.

“No,” Bixby says. “I’ll never get these. Even he hasn’t finished them.” He shakes his head and repeats, “Why would he do this to me?”

And then Bixby realizes: Endeavour wouldn’t do this to him.

_“It’s ’n endeavour.”_

_Bixby felt his stomach twist. Was it always going to be thus? Game after game?  Were they ever going to be able to speak clearly to one another?_

_But then, what else could they have really? What future could there be for them?_

_“It’s an endeavour?” Bixby sighed. “What is that supposed to mean, old man? Is it a challenge? Something I’m just going to have to figure out? Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not like your friends—I’m just no good at these sorts of riddles. Can’t you simply tell me?_

_Pagan turned, and was facing him once again, his eyes close and blue and luminous in the half-light._

_“No,” he said. “I mean, that’s my name. It’s Endeavour.”_

_Oh._

_Could it really be that simple?_

 

Even when he had told Bixby his name, a matter that fell so near to his heart, Endeavour hadn’t played that sort of game with him. And he wouldn’t do so now. He knows that Bixby sees things only in black and white.

Black and white.

Like a newspaper.

“It’s not the crosswords,” Bixby says. And again, as soon as he says the words out loud, he knows they are true. “There’s something in these newspapers he wants me to see.”

He jumps up, grabs the papers, and gathers them together, smoothing them out across the bed into an orderly pile. Then he begins to flip through the pages. Flip. Flip. Flip. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, but this time, he is sure he’s on the right track, that he’ll know what Endeavour is trying tell him when he sees it.

Flip. Flip.

And then, Bixby’s heart jumps.

And then, there it is.

A rustic group of figures are gathered around the Christ child, and an angel with broad white wings and a head full of curls holds out his arms, looking as if he’s about to fall out of the sky.

Bixby’s eye jumps to the headline.

 

**CDJP create special commission to investigate stolen Caravaggio**

 

He scans the article, but only phrases pop out at him; his mind is reeling. The Central Directorate of the Judicial Police have created a special commission to investigate the theft of a painting, the Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence, stolen from a chapel in Palermo, Sicily. A large panel by baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Missing since last October. Mafia connections suspected, the FBI consulted and . . . Dear God.

Bixby stares at the paper in disbelief. He turns and abruptly heads back downstairs. He sees the Thursdays exchange glances, and then they follow in his wake.

Downstairs, they file silently by the two constables in the front room. Bixby leads the Thursdays straight to his study and closes the door. He goes over to the bookcase and slides the painting out.

“Good! . . .” Thursday begins to shout, but Mrs. Thursday places a hand over his mouth. He nods in understanding.

When she removes it, he whispers harshly, “Good God, son! It didn’t cross your mind to think of this?”

“I know,” Bixby whispers imploringly, “I know! But I didn’t know it was Italian. I bought it at the most kitschy, garish shop in Colmar for three hundred francs! How was I to know? It was covered in purple velvet for God’s sakes! It was ludicrous!”

“We’ve even got a memo on this thing down at the nick. Didn’t you ever show this to Morse?”

“No, I was hiding it until May. It was supposed to be a present for . . .”  He’s about to say “our anniversary” but he realizes that sounds ridiculous on any number of levels. Not the least of which is Bixby is fairly certain that, when he showed that first painting to Endeavour long ago, Endeavour quite detested him.

Bixby stands in front of the painting, at a momentary loss. He hasn’t the slightest idea what to do from here. How’s he going to get it out of here, to get it to Lamarche, with constables circulating through the house twenty-four hours a day?

He slides the painting all the way out from behind the bookcase, trying to get a better handle on its size. As he does, it bumps a crumpled piece of paper that had fallen behind the curtain on the floor, next to the wastepaper basket, as if someone had tried to toss it in and missed. That’s odd. He’s got a pretty good aim, if he does say so himself.

He sets the painting back against the wall, picks the paper up, and smooths it out. It’s not a draft of a letter or a report or a contract—it’s all laid out in stanzas.

It’s Endeavour’s.

How would this have gotten in here? Unless Endeavour was in here as well.

 

And then, a torrent of memories resounds through Bixby’s mind, and they all speak with Endeavour’s voice.

_“I just saw something . . . and I thought. . . and I didn’t even know how I got there. I don’t . . . I don’t remember going outside. . . I was just running. . . . and I tripped . . . and I realized I was being stupid . . . and I came home. That’s all there is to it. Please, don’t let’s talk about it.”_

He saw something, then. And if he didn’t remember going outside, he must have been inside when he saw it. It must have been something in the house that had sent him on his flight into the woods.

 

_There, well, there are these finches. Look. The daft things built a nest right here in the window box.”_

_“Yes, finches do that,” Bixby said._

_“They’re awfully exposed, aren’t they?”_

But it wasn’t the only the finches who were exposed, was it? ….

 

_“You could still ask me things, if you wanted. Or is it because . . . are you. . . .”_

_Bixby heard the worry there, understood immediately. “No. I’m done with that. Did you see anyone come around here to ask questions when Rose went down?”_

_“No,” Endeavour conceded._

_“I told you—I never had anything to do with that side of things. And that’s down to you.”_

_“So, if you had . . . anything like that again… anything you thought was questionable, would you tell me?”_

_Bixby looked at him, confused. “Of course.”_

_Endeavour’s eyes seemed to waver back and forth at unclockable speed, searching his face. Then he took a deep breath, like one one might take before jumping into a cold lake in spring._

_“All right,” he said._

 

No, of course it wasn’t only the finches who had chosen an unwise place to nest …. Not when Endeavour expected the central police to be banging on the door at any moment. And after all, what else would send him fleeing out through the trees like a madman if not the fear of going back to prison?  And no wonder Pagan had lost faith in him. . . . and yet. . .

And yet he came back.

Bixby smooths the paper out, and tries to read it, but for some reason his vision is blurred.

“He knew it was here,” he says. And again, as soon as he says the words aloud, he knows they are true. “He thought I was an art thief, can you imagine?”

And he ran away, into the woods. And then he came back. Despite it all, he came back. 

Bixby scans the painting again, and his eyes are drawn to the angel hovering above—the one who had so reminded him of Endeavour. The angel holds one long sinewy arm up to the sky and, with the other, reaches down to the people below, as if he’s trying to place a hand out to protect them— even as he seems to fear hurdling down into their midst.

He remembers the stories Thursday had told of DC Morse; how it seemed as if Thursday had spoken of a stranger, of a separate person entirely from the Endeavour he knew.

But now, Bixby sees that there is a strand that binds them all: Morse and Pagan and Endeavour. It’s what drove DC Morse to the point of self-sacrifice, what survived in the quiet of the woods in Pagan, and what is still there, untouched, in Endeavour.

****

It was after the funeral of Madame Zumofen’s husband. Bixby had got trapped somehow, out on a balcony with a rather loud and unruly band of Louis Zumofren’s friends.

They were turning the gathering into a full-fledged party. They were all of them survivors: they had left a quarter of their childhood friends behind far, far, back in time—lost them in trenches in 1917. The fact that one of their number had died quietly in his sleep at the age of 73 was, for these men, cause for celebration. They told story after story about their youths, and, by nine, they were all three sheets to the wind.

As the night wore on, they grew more raucous—the noise in the crammed little house, the masculine shouting and laughing and one-upping, grew more and more discordant. It was the sort of thing that could send Endeavour to the tipping point, into one of those moods where he refused to leave the house for days. Bixby thought he had better find him, that it was time for them to be heading home.

He couldn’t locate him in the house, and, so he went back out onto the large balcony. There he was—down in the garden below, sitting in a lawn chair beside Madame Zumofen, one long, lanky arm wrapped around her shoulder.

When Bixby approached, he could see that Madame had clearly been crying, but she was smiling through her tears. “We were some of the lucky ones, I know,” she said. “and that’s the truth. But if only . . . I’d feel so much better if Louis would send me some sort of sign, to let me know he was all right, that he was happy.”

At just that moment, a cigarette, its tip still lit with a bright red spark, sailed by, tossed by some drunken former comrade from the balcony above.

“Oh look, did you see that?” Madame exclaimed, clutching Endeavour’s shoulder. “It was a shooting star!  It must have been sent by my Louis!”

The look on Endeavour’s mobile face defied description: it was pain and anxiety and confusion all in one.

“Yes,” Endeavour said, at last, avowing to a sign from a God that Bixby knew he had given up on years ago, “Yes, I saw it too.”

She leaned her head on his shoulder and sobbed with an odd mixture of exhaustion and joy.

****

Bixby smiles at the memory.

His mind had been focused on deciphering the clue, but, all the while, it’s the last five letters of the note that have been echoing though his heart.

_Love, E._

He doesn’t know what he has done to deserve such love. For that’s just now what he sees is the thread that runs through the tapestry. It was love that drove DC Morse to the point of no return. Love that led Pagan to hide in the woods, trying to spare those around him from the boundlessness of his own misery. Love that leads Endeavour out into the world and then back to Bixby, even in the face of his greatest fears.

 

Well, Bixby thinks, as the angel looks down at him: if they want this painting, they can have it.

He almost feels sorry for Endeavour’s captors for making such a foolhardy exchange.

They don’t know that the painting is only a copy. They don’t know that they are the ones who have the real thing.

 

*********************

Can one act make a difference in a life?

It’s difficult to say. Intentions so rarely match outcomes.

Some people end up saving the ones that they once half-tried to kill.

Some people half-kill the ones that they mean to save.

The world is a blur. It’s a haze of dark green and darkness, and then it’s white and filled with bright lights and quiet voices and gentle beeps.

One voice is a voice he once ran from, one that had spoken in Greek, low and harsh, in the woods. But now, strangely enough, it sounds comfortingly familiar. The other voice is that of a woman—Pagan tried to place her, but he couldn’t seem to manage it.  

 

“The doctor says you saved this young man’s life,” she said.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Henry said.

“Well, that’s what he said,” the woman insisted.

“Hmmmm,” Henry said. “I suppose he’s my onion, then.”

“Onion? What kind of funny talk is that?”

“It’s from a Russian folktale. There was a terrible woman who was evil down to her bones. When she died, the devils came to drag her down to hell. And her guardian angel beheld her in the fiery pit and wept. He cast about for something that might save her, and could think of only one thing. “She can’t be cast into the pit,” he told the devil, “for once, she gave an onion to a poor peasant woman.” And the devil said, alright, hold the onion over the lake of fire and let the woman hang on to it, and if it’s strong enough to pull her out, she may go.”

“Goodness,” the woman said. “That’s an odd sort of story. And who said anything about going to hell? You seem like a nice enough boy, I would say.”

 

Why was Henry talking about onions? Pagan thought.  God, it made him sick to his stomach.

 But no, it wasn’t onions that he meant: he was telling the story Grusha tells in the Brothers Karamazov.

 

And Pagan felt like he was going to be sick and he threw the copy of the Brothers Karamazov to the floor. And the Illiad. And the Shropshire Lad. Thump. Thump.

It had to be here somewhere.

The lake house was only thirty feet by twenty—he had only the few boxes of things Inspector Thursday had brought him and the few odds and ends given to him since he arrived. It’s not as if there were many places it could be. It must be here somewhere. It must be.

He paced back and forth, pulling up cushions he’d pulled up twenty times before, ripping the sheets off of the bed.

And he wasn’t sure how long he’d been looking, but the sun seemed to be moving fairly quickly: the light that used to pour in one set of windows was moving, already beginning to pour in from another, right before his eyes.

He threw himself on the ground, and, as he did, his hair flew into his face. He pushed it out of the way and looked under the chairs, under the bed. He scanned each wood beam of the floor. Even though he’d already done so. Again and again and again.

He was frantic—it was finally happening, it was the edge, the edge he’d go over and fall over once and for all. Past touch past sight past sound. And this is what he deserved, this was his repayment for trusting anything in the outside world—even a simple notebook.

 He should have just let the words build up inside him until he exploded into pieces all over the lake house walls.

He got up and paced about. Maybe it slipped between the planks of the wood floor? He fell to his knees and began to tear at a plank, to pull it up, but it was nailed in, solid, and all he succeeded in doing was shredding his fingertips.

And then, there was a shadow in the doorway. And it was that man.

“What on earth are you doing?” he said.

Pagan’s head snapped up. And suddenly he knew. The man was always rummaging about, wasn’t he? Always too intrusive to be borne.

“You!” he shouted.

The man looked confused.

“It was you! It was you! You took it!”

The man’s face crumpled slightly, his confident smile fading.

“You mean that green notebook?” he asked.

By God, he doesn’t even try to deny it, Pagan thought.  

“Yes! Yes, that green notebook! Where is it?”

“I took it.”

“Took it?” Pagan asked wildly. “Where?”

“Well, I thought it was rather interesting. I was talking with someone at the party the other night, and he told me of a publisher, and . . I . . .you have so many, I didn’t think you would notice . . . ”

“Give it back right now!”

“I can’t,” the man said, “I mailed it. To that publisher.”  

“What?” Pagan cried. He put his head in his hands and groaned. “Why? Why? Why would you do such a thing?”

Pagan couldn’t even bear to look at the man. His voice sounded uncharacteristically hesitant. “It was meant to be a surprise. I was talking to Pippa at Kay’s birthday party and she said she couldn’t believe you all were beginning to turn thirty. I asked her when you would be, and she said September next year. So, I just, thought, well, good God man, if you’re turning thirty in a year and a bit, you need some sort of career, don’t you? You can’t stew around in this lake house for the rest of your life.”

Pagan was rendered speechless. Of course, he could. Didn’t the man understand that the was the whole point of living as he did?  Making certain that “rest of his life” would entail six months, a year at the most?

The man was encouraged by Pagan’s silence and pressed on: “You’ve already made it clear you won’t move up to the house. What were you planning to do when winter comes? You certainly can’t stay out here.”

“Yes,” Pagan said. “Yes, I can!”

“But surely, I would  . . .  I would have thought all poets want to be discovered,” the man said, looking bewildered.   

“Discovered?  Discovered? I’m living in a shack in the woods! What on earth would lead you to believe I want to be _discovered_? I want to be forgotten! Utterly forgotten!  I want to pass out in the woods one night and freeze and never get up! I want the leaves to cover me and to be left alone and to be utterly, utterly forgotten! I want to be completely erased from all memory!”   

He wasn’t sure if he was managing to say the words out loud or not: he only knew that he had when he saw the horrified look on the man’s face.

But Pagan was just getting started. “I don’t need your help! I don’t need your goddamned connections or your plotting or your schemes! Now get out and leave me alone!”

Bixby looked affronted, then relieved, as if he understood. “Oh, is that what this is all about? Give me more credit than that, old man. I know how you artistic types don’t like that sort of thing. What is that—“selling out?” I didn’t use any connections. I didn’t use my name at all. I gave my address, the address of my house in London, but that’s fairly anonymous. After all,” he smiled weakly, encouragingly, “I don’t suppose you get the post out here.”

“You didn’t use your name?” Pagan asked. “Then what name did you use?”

“Your name.”

“My name? What name is that?”

“Why, what do you think? Endeavour Morse.”

The inhuman keening that echoed off the walls of the cabin frightened Pagan half to death before he realized he was the one making the sound.

 “What on earth is the matter with that?” the man was saying—he had been gaining confidence, his had reverted to that smooth, warm voice that always held the trace of a laugh, as if Pagan were a child in the midst of an incomprehensible tantrum. “I would have thought it would be the perfect name for a poet. I would have thought it was a publisher’s dream. A whole marketing department couldn’t make up a better pen name if it tried.”

“ _Marketing department_?” Pagan wailed. “Oh my God!”

What other forms of hell could he be expected to endure?

To have his soul, sold, too, as if he were some sort of . . .

Pagan put his face in his hands. There was nothing he could do about it now. The thing was done. The only thing he could hope for would be that the package would be buried beneath those of all the eager undergraduates and other people foolish enough to put their hearts on paper. It would be buried and utterly forgotten under leaves of would-be books, just as he aspired to be buried and utterly forgotten under the leaves of the trees around the lake house.

Pagan shook his head in silence, struggled to calm his breathing. “Just go away,” he said wearily. “Just go away and leave me alone.”

The man had the audacity to laugh. “No,” he said.

Pagan’s head snapped up. “No?”

“Well, I’m terribly sorry old man. I just . . . I must have misunderstood. I would have thought you’d be happy with the idea. I can see now I made a mistake, somehow. But if you think I’m going to leave you here rolling around on the floor after you’ve just told me that your one goal in life is to freeze to death in the woods, then you really must have lost your senses. I’m not having you on my conscience.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Would he never be free of this man? The least he could do was to have the good grace to leave him in peace.

To add insult to injury, the man was standing right in the door, blocking him in. He had told him time and time again not to stand there, but he always did it anyway.

Pagan eyed the space under the man’s arm, where he held his hand up, bracing himself in the doorway. It should be large enough for him to duck under; then he could be out in the woods and then he’d run. He’d be free, and then he’d have a few minutes of silence. Surely, he should be allotted that much.

“I wouldn’t try it,” the man said sagely, as if reading his thoughts. “Or you could. But I did play football in school, you know. Just to give you fair warning.” He smiled as if he had made some sort of joke.

But Pagan didn’t know what he was on about. Football? What on earth was he talking about now? How could that possibly be pertinent?  

The man must have misunderstood the reason for the look of incredulity on Pagan’s face, because he looked down at himself with rare self-depreciation.

“I know I’m not . . . ,” he said, and he held his arms out as if he were a gorilla. Then he smiled again and shrugged. “Wide receiver, old man.”

Pagan stared at the man as if he were the most fantastic creature he had ever seen. “I don’t know what you’re talking about nor do I don’t care,” he said.

 

But Pagan recognized the tactic. This is what the man did, when he was backed into a corner. Blindsided you with smiles and pointless jokes and smoke and mirrors until you were completely turned around, so that you began to feel you were in an absurdist play. He made light of everything. He took nothing seriously. Nothing, nothing, nothing.  

To top it all off, all that had to be a lie. He heard him talking about football to Bruce, and it was pretty clear he didn’t know any more about the game than Pagan.

Suddenly, Pagan was exhausted. He stretched out on the floor and laid down, turning his head away.

“It’s fine,” he said, trying to reassure himself more than the man. It wasn’t the man’s fault, after all, that he didn’t know any better. “It’ll go to some dead-end office.” He laughed at the appropriateness of the thought. “No one will probably actually read it.”  

“What are you talking about?” the man asked. “Goodness, I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so selfish.”

 “ _Selfish_?” Pagan cried. “What do you mean?”

“I didn’t mean. . .”  the man sputtered: he seemed to know he was floundering again. “All I meant was: it’s not all about you, is it?…  I mean, I’m not a terribly literary person, but when I read that notebook, I felt. . . well . . …I . . . ” he broke off, as if unable to decide how to finish his sentence.

Pagan remained where he was, but turned his head back to the man, curious in spite of himself. Felt what? What could someone like him, a virtual icon of status and success, see in the scribblings of a complete failure. Not just of someone who had failed at school or work, mind you—Pagan had never cared that much about finishing his degree or pursuing his career— but who had failed at life itself?

His one aspiration, after all, when he dropped from his window in Lincolnshire, was to no longer be alone.

And, after all his attempts and strivings, here he was: in a shack in the middle of the woods, about as alone as it was possible to be.

When the man noticed that Pagan had turned his face, he stopped. Then he looked at him, a faint line creasing his brow. “Why would you write all that if you didn’t want anyone to read it?  Isn’t that sort of pointless? Sort of an unfinished circle, isn't it?”

Pagan turned his head away again. The man would never understand. Everything he did had to have a point.

The man had all the introspection of a garden snail.

No. Of a freight train. He just barreled on through life without a thought.  

And what was the point of arguing? After all, according to his standards and values, he had paid him the highest compliment possible.

He was marketable. 

All of the sudden, it seemed the funniest thing: lying on the floor of a ripped-apart shack, his hair in a mess about his face, he felt anything but “marketable.” Pagan began laughing at the very idea.

This seemed to unnerve Bixby. “Why are you laughing?” Bixby said. “You aren’t planning some sort of operatic revenge are you?”

“Yes,” said Pagan, “Yes, I am.”

Pagan turned his head and looked up. The man actually looked sort of frightened.

“I’m joking,” he said.

“Oh,” the man said, and finally dared to smile his real smile.  

Well, the man was as shallow as a pool in the woods, but at least there wasn’t much dangerous that could be hidden in his depths, such as they were. He was a freight train, but at least it made it easy to see from which direction he was coming.

You have to see people for who they are.

And if you see them, maybe you can love them.

And if they can see you—or even if they are only trying to see you, but failing—sometimes, that's all you can hope for. Sometimes, that's enough.

Because some people are harder to see than others.

And Pagan knew he wasn’t easy to see.

 

“I don’t like it, Luc. He did see me, after all.”

 

He did see me, after all, Pagan thinks. But no. He’s not Pagan. He’s Endeavour and his world is dark green, like the woods, but made of silk.  

 

“We’ll meet Bixby in Lamarche tomorrow night, we’ll get the painting and we’ll be long gone. Stop your kvetching.”

“How are we going to be long gone, eh? _You’ll_ be long gone. But what’s to stop him from giving him my description to the police?”

“I’m sure he didn’t see you for that long, Antonio. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Oh, yes? Well, then, let’s let him get a good look at you, too, then.”

“Alright. Alright. Let’s . . . let me just think about it, alright? It just—it wasn’t what I had in mind when we started this project. Let’s just . . . It sounds like Phillipe is here . . . let’s go talk to him about it.  See what he thinks.”  

 

Endeavour lies still, but a chill falls over him.

What “ _wasn’t what he had in mind_?”

Suddenly, he begins to doubt that they are planning to just hand him over.

Somehow, he feels that he’ll never reach Lamarche.

Well, of course, he won’t. Not if he makes his exit first.

It’s a long shot, but he’ll have to take it. If they are still somewhere in Nancy, and they take the A33 to Lamarche, they’ll pass right through . . .

 

Well, he thinks.  How apropos.

 

He rubs the side of his face against the arm of the couch he’s lying on and pulls the blindfold up. He’s in a living room with dark green walls and heavy wooden furniture. By the couch, there’s a coffee table with newspapers. He scans the papers, looking for numbers, while he tugs at the ropes on his wrists. At first, all he can do is scrape at the half-healed skin; it takes several harsh jerks until he cuts deep enough with the rough edge of the rope to start a trickle of blood.

There’s a business section and a sports section; both should have numbers. The business section Endeavour rules out: He knows how Bixby loves to spread all the stock pages out across the floor and walk among them—looking at God knows what.

And Bixby says _he’s_ odd.

Endeavour finds it baffling, but he doesn’t want to ruin that for Bixby, tarnish his beloved columns of miniscule numbers with the memories a message written in blood.

So, the sports section it is. “Wide receiver” my arse, whatever the hell that is.  The sports page is open territory for a message that’s made in a manner that is—in truth—a bit macabre. But it’s not as if he has much to work with here.

And, at any rate, all he needs are five numbers.

He turns away from the table and looks back over his shoulder, marking numbers across the broadsheet with one bloodied thumb.

 

2 4 6 9 9

 

Then he shuffles some of the other papers over it with the back of his knuckles, covering the marks.

 

Can one action make a difference?

Endeavour will find out tomorrow. Because it turns out that Bixby was right all along.

He doesn’t want to be forgotten, after all.

And who ever would have imagined that?


	8. Chapter 8

 

“So,” Bixby says, “what shall it be? Should I tell the Inspector of the suspicions I have concerning one of his officers? Or will that just backfire? The Inspector doesn’t know me from Adam, after all, old man. There’s no reason he should trust me more than his men.”

Thursday rubs his chin, considering. “I’ll have to give it some thought. I don’t have a good handle on the man. Haven’t had a great many chances to speak to him.”

“Could we narrow it down perhaps?” Mrs. Thursday asks. “If we had some idea who it might be, that might sound more tenable, as opposed to us casting suspicions on all and sundry.”

Bixby thinks back, trying to find a pattern between the shifts of the revolving constables and the movements of Endeavour and his captors. He sees in his mind the flash of the constables’ warrant cards as they reported in, tries to remember which ones were at the house —where they were privy to the investigation’s latest developments—before each of the times that Endeavour disappeared.

“It’s either A. Lefebvre or P. Brassard.”

Thursday nods.

Just then, there is a knock on the study door. The three look at one another in silence. How long had someone been there, just outside the door?

 “Monsieur Bixby?” a voice calls.

Bixby sets his glass down, crosses the room, and opens the door. “Yes?”

The French Inspector is there in the hall, holding a piece of paper.

“I have a few updates for you. It seems Monsieur Morse has left another message.”

“What do you mean?” Bixby asks sharply.

“We managed to trace Monsieur Morse and his captors to another house, on the other side of Nancy. When we got there, one of the officers found a newspaper—marked with five bloodied thumbprints. We ran the prints, and they are a match to Endeavour Morse’s. Do you know what these numbers might mean?”

He hands Bixby a plain piece of yellow paper, ripped from a notepad.

Bixby puts one hand to his temple and takes the paper with the other. He could have done without hearing about more bloody thumbprints, but, still, he has cause for hope: Endeavour must be well enough, at least, to be looking for opportunities to pass them information.  

He feels his heart speed up in the moments before he looks at the numbers—if only they were to make some sort of sense this time, he’d be reassured.

He looks down at the paper.

2 4 6 9 9

He takes a steadying breath and shakes his head. “No,” he says. “No, this . . . this doesn’t mean anything at all to me.” He puts his hand to his forehead and takes another deep breath, this one more tremulous than the first. “He must, he just must be grasping at straws, or. . . the poor thing must be . . .”  but he can’t bring himself to finish the sentence.

He looks up at the ceiling and blinks rapidly. Mrs. Thursday comes up alongside him and puts a small warm hand on his shoulder.

“Could, I  . . .,” Bixby begins. “Might I take this? Perhaps if I took this to his study, looked through some of his things, I might think of something.”

“But of course,” the Inspector says.

Bixby turns to the Thursdays. “Would you come with me for a moment? There are a few books perhaps you could look through, to see if he’s marked anything.”

“Of course, love,” Mrs. Thursday says.

They follow him out of the room and down the long hall, further into the house, to Endeavour’s study.

As soon as he closes the door, he feels his hands are shaking.

“So, love, these numbers are just as obscure as the others, then?” Mrs. Thursday asks, sympathetically. He realizes he must look a wreck—but it’s not despair that’s causing him to tremble. It’s sheer adrenaline.

Because he knows exactly what these numbers mean. He knew the instant he looked at them.

He had, after all, spent almost an entire afternoon at his lawyer’s office writing three of these numbers down over and over again, as he filled out the endless paperwork involved in transferring a few of his enterprises to Endeavour.

As soon as he saw the yellow piece of paper, a vision of one of the forms swam into his mind.

Name: Morse, Endeavour

Date of Birth. 24/9/38

 

So, 2 4 6 9 9

24/9/69

Where were they on Endeavour’s last birthday?  In The Forest of Darney. Which happens to lie right between Nancy and Lamarche.

2 4 6 9 9

Meet me in the Forest of Darney.

Now the only question is: how much to trust the police? He doesn’t know how many people are involved in Endeavour’s abduction—there might be more than he and Thursday can handle alone. He can’t imagine that he won’t need the police at some point.

But, if he tells them too soon about Endeavour's message, might not A. Lefebvre or P. Brassard have a chance to tip off his friends? And therefore thwart whatever it is Endeavour has in mind?

It’s Mrs. Thursday who comes up with the answer. “On the night of the fifteenth, you boys go ahead and start towards the forest, then. I’ll wait here and give you—what would be good, how far is it? An hour? An hour and a half? And then I’ll go out and tell the police in the drawing room. I can say that you've just figured it out and that you've dashed off. That way, the police should arrive in time to help you and Morse, but it won’t give the co-conspirator enough time to tip the kidnappers off, to stop Morse from doing whatever he’s planning.

Bixby and Thursday look at one another.

“Well,” Mrs. Thursday chirps, “What do you think?”

“I think perhaps I’ve made a mistake, leaving work at the hat stand all these years,” Thursday says.

****************

It’s sad to admit, but one of Morse’s happiest moments took place only in the mind of a mattress salesman whose name he never knew.

 

When Pagan reported for basic training and became, once again, Morse, he took on all that that meant—he remembered all the lessons he had learned the first time he had been Morse—when he lost his childish illusions, his ridiculous Christian name, and his dinner of stewed rabbit behind his father’s woodpile.

Morse knew not to expect too much. He learned to be grateful for what scraps of happiness he could find.

The first time he had been Morse, living in Lincolnshire and hiding in his room listening to records, he did dream that he might eventually find a different sort of life, off in the realm of “one fine day.”

But after Pagan’s bubble world at Oxford popped, he came to understand that his existence was tainted in some subtle yet essential way. He was not meant for happiness, and it was not meant for him. That was the one thing that was clear.

How to explain, then, when he happened to meet Monica in front of a mattress shop, that the salesman should mistake him for a happily married man out with his beautiful wife on such a thoroughly domestic errand?

He had long ago come to the conclusion that, this taint, or this otherness or whatever the hell it was that set him apart, must be written into his very face—that every fiber of his being must testify to his innate and incurable loneliness. That it must echo through his every move, every turn of his head, making his insulation and isolation apparent to one and all.

But perhaps it was not so? Or else how else could the salesman have looked at Morse and given him, in an instant, a completely different fate?

After the man greeted them, beckoning them into the shop, Morse felt his heart clench as he waited for the inevitable moment: the moment when Monica would recoil, step back, and say, “we’re not together.”

But it didn’t come.

Instead, she smiled and played along, like it was the most natural thing in the world, even bantered with him with a hint of flirtation in her warm smile.

As they stretched out on the mattress, he felt suddenly that he had been picked up and thrust into a completely different life. It felt not just like a game, but achingly real. As if what was true in the mind of the salesman had somehow become true in reality as well.

 A police officer and a nurse? What could make more sense? And they would never be wealthy, never live the life that he had lived as Pagan, but it would be a happy life all the same. They’d be comfortable enough, and they might have children—and they’d be good parents, wouldn’t they? He knew he’d never be like his father and Monica was certainly nothing like Gwen. And he and Monica would love one another and love their children and they’d have a little house in which they actually ran the gas, a house that might be modest but would actually be what it looked to be—the home of a family.

 And he would never take his children to hunt rabbits, and even if they liked football he would go to their matches, because he loved them, and even when it was clear he knew nothing about football, his children would simply roll their eyes and laugh and they’d forgive him for whatever wrong thing he said, because they loved him, too.

 

And he stretches out on the mattress, but the football fields he dreams of are not football fields—they aren’t summer green, but rather dark green. Like the woods. But made of silk.

And he’s Endeavour and his heart is racing.  How long how had he been out for now? Had he missed his chance? Had the exchange already been attempted and perhaps failed while he was out cold? It’s all so disorienting—If only he could see something besides dark green, perhaps he’d be able to anchor himself, calm his breathing.

It’s done, he thinks. It’s over; he’s missed his shot. And his heart won’t settle. He feels it might burst out of his chest, like a struggling bird. He takes a slow, deep breath, to calm himself, but a fresh surge of cold panic begins to course through his veins. Once he begins to tremble, he can’t stop, and he rolls onto his side, crossing his arms over himself, as if he is trying to stop himself from flying apart.

How odd that this should happen when he had just been dreaming of Morse.

Morse was never afraid of anything. He ran on rooftops and crashed through floors and left newspapers with people who were two steps behind, while he ran on towards the bloodbath.

Endeavour isn’t sure when the fog of fear began to settle in at the edges of his mind, threatening to roll in at the slightest provocation. He had never known such fear when he was Morse, certainly. Thinking of some of the things that Morse did seem inexplicable, to him, in fact.

Perhaps it was because Morse had nothing to lose anyway? That Morse simply didn’t care what happened to him?

After all, what was the worst that could happen to Morse? That he might die? And he didn’t fear death. Because he didn’t particularly care for life.

Perhaps a little of what Susan had said at that last party was true.

He can feel Pagan bristle at that thought. Yes, certainly that was it. It was just too bad that, for all of Morse’s so-called brilliance, for all his introspection, he didn’t stop and think that there are things worse than death—there’s also the long, slow collapse of the soul, a collapse that goes unseen and unheard, that starts from the inside out.

But then, Pagan wasn’t subject to a thousand nameless fears, either. The thing that Morse did not know to fear had happened—and he had endured. What was there left to do?  The sun came up in the morning as it had always done, and somehow, you had to get through whatever days remained to you.

*****

It wasn’t for quite a long time after Bixby started calling Pagan Endeavour that he began to feel like Endeavour.

Bixby seemed to feel it was for the best, that he use his original name, as if he were reclaiming his true identity, taking control of his destiny, or some such nonsense.

Pagan wasn’t so sure about that.

Who was Endeavour, anyway? Pagan had left him behind so long ago, he wasn’t sure. Endeavour was someone who darted across the wolds in Lincolnshire, someone who slammed doors and got his shoes muddy and thought it was perfectly natural to be loved anyway, someone who could summon tears for rabbits.

Endeavour didn’t know any better.

He didn’t feel like Endeavour until he packed his suitcases and left Pagan behind at the lake house. He felt worse about it than Pagan had felt about leaving Morse, but then again, none of this had been Pagan’s doing.

 

As he put his record player in the back seat of the Jag and looked at the lake house for the last time, he realized that it was fitting that he was becoming Endeavour now—but not for the all the hale and hearty grasp-your-own-good-fortune reasons that Bixby was forever extolling.

After all, who else but a twelve-year-old would be trusting enough, or foolish enough, to pack his bags and leave the country with someone he scarcely knew?

Even Pagan had flipped through those tickets to Argentina, been savvy enough to ask why they weren’t for a round trip. And Susan had been his fiancé.

Who was Bixby really? No one knew anything much about him at all. He seemed to have sprung up from nowhere, like a demigod from some tale in _Metamorphoses._

And now, Endeavour was blithely following him to another country.

In retrospect, they probably needn’t have gone that far. Even as they packed, Parliament was making changes in the law in England.  But they both of them were a bit naïve about such things: neither of them had enormous cause to follow the intricacies of the debate, because, in the past, such laws hadn’t really applied to them. For Endeavour, there had been only Susan, a brief dead-end fling with Alice, and Monica. And although Bixby, as with all else, seemed to know precisely what he was doing when they collided out in the woods, his romantic history seemed to be compiled of one stunningly beautiful socialite after another.

Endeavour knew this because, Bixby being Bixby, he was still on cordial terms with all of them, and all of them were still keen on coming to his parties. Over the months, as rumors about he and Bixby began to circulate, many of the women seemed eager to hunt him down at the parties, as if curious to see what Bixby was on about.

They most of them seemed perplexed. One of them went so far as to take a long drag on her cigarette while openly looking him up and down, before exhaling a sharp burst of smoke and commenting, “Huh. I just don’t get it.”

Pagan pretended he had no idea what the woman was talking about. Still, it was clear that somehow, people were putting the puzzle pieces together. Even though Pagan and Bixby had thought that in public, at any rate, they had been models of decorum.

So, with Bixby’s house now the scene of Henry’s suicide, and Pagan’s growing colder and damper as autumn set in, a flight to France seemed a plausible solution—it just made sense—didn’t it? —to pack up and start somewhere anew.

*****

It was on the plane.

It must have been on the plane that it started: Endeavour looked down out of the window as the world receded, turned from something real into just a patchwork of green. It was dizzying. He was rising up and up and up and away from it all. He felt like he couldn’t breathe.

He wanted to say, “Wait, I need to go back— I’ve forgotten something.” But how on earth would he begin to explain what it was he had left behind?

Bixby was watching him, a faint line between his brows. “You all right, old man? You don’t get motion sickness, do you?”

Endeavour shook his head. “It must be that the air is so thin up here,” he said.

“The cabin’s pressurized, Endeavour,” Bixby said.

*****

By the time they arrived at Bixby’s house in Lorraine, he was completely overwhelmed by the enormity of what he had done.

He had never realized how much he had come to depend on the solid walls of the lake house to hold him together. It was so small, so snug, so isolated, so secure. He was alone there and he knew he was alone. And it was safe to be alone.

At Bixby’s, there were rooms and rooms full of wardrobes and chests and heavy four-poster beds. Anyone could be hiding in or behind or under any of them. Or in or behind or under all of them. Anyone could be right around the corner, stilling his breath so as to catch him by surprise.

The house was as great of an unknown as the man who owned it.  

Endeavour was seized with the desire to drop his suitcase where it was and to turn and run. Maybe he could get to the English embassy.

But whoever in the world could he call to ask to wire him money for a ticket home? Gwen, who would only be too happy to hear what a wreck he had made of his life? Tony, who would send the money but sigh and give him a lecture that would make him feel like absolute hell?

Thursday would send the money if he had it, he knew, but how could he ever ask? Thursday had two children just beginning to make their way in the world, who would need rent money and tuition and all sorts. He could hardly afford to buy a plane ticket for a twenty-eight-year-old runaway former bagman, after all.

Bizarrely, he even thought of calling Max DeBryn. They had been friends of sorts, hadn’t they? If one could say exchanging wry comments and pointed barbs over corpses was grounds for a friendship. And he was a doctor—one plane ticket couldn’t be so dear, to him.

Although how that conversation might go was difficult to imagine.

_Hello, Dr. DeBryn? This is Endeavour Morse. Yes, DC Morse. I never did tell you my Christian name, did I? Well, now you know why. (laughs)_

_I’m so sorry I didn’t get the chance to speak with you when last we met. I was a bit preoccupied I’m afraid—I always knew that crowd was a little wild, but who knew they were capable of . . . ?_

 

No, he couldn’t even bring himself to think about that.

 

_But you were busy, too, at the time, seeing as one of my old friends had just blown . . ._

 

No.

 

_Anyway, you’ll never guess where I’m calling from. (laughs)_

_Actually, I’m in France. What am I doing in France? How did I get work papers? Well, you see, for my occupation, I don’t actually need work papers. The thing of it is, I’m . . ._

Oh, God.

 He wanted to go bang his head against a wall.

 He could almost hear DeBryn now.

_So, entirely a fool then?_

Endeavour was running through a list of everyone he knew, when he realized that Bixby seemed to be waiting for something. Then it was clear: in showing him the different rooms upstairs, he meant to be offering him his choice of where he wished to stay.  It was possibly the most awkward, uncomfortable moment of their entire relationship, such as it was.  

It was kind of him to dress it up in such a manner, but what was the point of pretending? And at any rate, he didn’t feel equal to staying alone in any of these rooms . . . full of heavy opulent furniture and heavy opulent drapes, allowing plenty of places for where god-knows-who to hide and wait.

When they reached Bixby’s suite at the end of the hall, Endeavour set his suitcase down. It was what he was here for, after all, he supposed. 

He felt his heart begin to race. What was he doing?

After all, in the woods, when he and Bixby had met, it wasn’t so much with a sense of intention as with a sense of collision.

And Pagan had felt himself quite in charge—Bixby was always so deferential, waiting until Pagan made it quite clear what he wanted. And Pagan knew he could give Bixby a good sharp knee to the diaphragm the moment he wanted to and be on his way, off through the trees. The woods were his, his kingdom in exile. Bixby, with his dapper evening suits and perfectly groomed hair, was only ever a guest there.

Now, any advantage he may have once had was gone. Now, here he was, twenty-eight years old, without an education, without a career, without aspirations, without so much as five pounds in a bank account, installing himself in the bedroom of a man who was quite probably not what he seemed.

Had he really fallen this low?

Evidently.

That first night he spent in the house, he lay on his side in the darkness, turned away from Bixby, his mind reeling. He began to wonder if what Gwen had said so often all those years ago was true: there was something wrong with him, he should be institutionalized, he shouldn’t be allowed out in the world on his own volition.

That’s it, he thought. As soon as Bixby’s breathing slowed, as soon as he knew he was asleep, he’d go out the window. The ceilings in this house were high and dramatic, so it might be a longer drop than those he had made in Lincolnshire, but the thing would have to be done.

This was a mistake: just one more in a long line of mistakes. His whole life had been one long train wreck. Once car smashed, and when the first smashed the other smashed behind it and then the next smashed behind it and . . .

And then, Bixby placed a warm kiss on his nape, and quietly, almost devotionally, pressed himself up behind him, sending a jolt of longing that cut through the loneliness like a shiver of electricity. Endeavour slowly rolled over, and his mouth met Joss’s in the dark. The first kiss was tentative—as if they were strangers, as if they had not already been at each other for months, rolling in leaves in Oxfordshire.

It was enough: the warm, hard, almost frantic kisses that followed hummed through Endeavour, clearing away the fog. He pressed up closer, meshing their bodies tightly together.

Joss held his hands firmly at his waist as they kissed. They felt broad and steady around him, as if they were keeping him from flying apart.  Then, with one hand, he began rolling Endeavour’s pajama bottoms along with his shorts down over his hips and down his legs. When Joss reached his ankles, Endeavour pulled his legs up and kicked the entangling clothes away—he was glad to be free of them.

He was losing all sense of time. His hands were on Joss’s shoulders, that were steady and warm, and after all, real. And then Joss was working a slick finger into him and Endeavour gasped, and maybe it wasn’t so terrible, what he had done. Maybe he didn’t need to find the embassy.

Because soon Joss was pounding into him with the same, familiar blissful rhythm that sent his overactive mind—so filled with the thoughts and worries of too many different people—spinning on its edge like a gold gambling chip, one that revolves and shines and sparkles in the light and then slowly, slowly comes to rest.

His name didn’t matter, whatever voice his mind spoke in didn’t matter —the only thing that mattered was the feel of Joss slapping against him and the crown of his head banging lightly against the headboard, until he half leapt up off of the mattress, crushing his chest against Joss’s in a series of spasms that and tore one long moan from Joss’s throat.

Joss’s hands flew again to his hips, and held him steady, as he spent himself into him, filling him with that warmth that was like sunlight and all the things he knew he lacked.

Joss immediately began to ease himself out, but Endeavour swung his legs up held him tightly against him. Joss’s eyelids fluttered and he let out a groan of gratitude, as if he had not been expecting to be allowed to linger.

They rocked together, slowly, Joss’s face buried in his shoulder, while Endeavour carded his hands through his thick, dark hair.

And what was the point of pretending? They were each a part of the other now. There was no explanation for it, but Endeavour came to understand that even if once Bixby fell asleep—limp and satisfied and smiling to himself—Endeavour _were_ to go out the window and disappear, that would never change. No matter how many miles he put between them before dawn.

*****

After a few weeks, he began to feel it: it was sort of like hope, a fragile potential happiness that wasn’t quite here, but could be.

Bixby went about his business, ignoring him completely for hours at a time, as if this arrangement were all perfectly natural. At first Endeavour was surprised, but then he realized, surely, he had things to do; he must have to pay for all of this somehow.

Endeavour stretched out on the bright red and cream Persian carpet in the drawing room and listened to his records when Bixby was downstairs in his study. Or he wrote in the dining room, spreading papers in rows across the end of a table long enough to seat thirty.

Somehow, something began to switch. He went from feeling that he might flee from the place at any moment, to feeling that he never wanted to leave it.

It was odd: He had never lived with anyone, or been close to anyone, who seemed to require nothing from him. It seemed he was always struggling to please people who would never be pleased—trying to clean the floor in a way that might get at least a murmur of thanks from Gwen, working under the hood of his father’s cab, turning the engine over in his mind as if it were a puzzle, until he found out the problem, hoping his father might be impressed.

Susan had always been a mystery. At first, he had been grateful to her for her help—what to wear, what fork to use at elaborate dinners. But she was always oscillating between extremes. It was “aren’t you the cutest thing?” one moment and “what the hell are you doing?” the next. In retrospect, she had said many of the same things to the Pekinese she had at her parents’ house.

With Bixby, everything he did was “fine.”

_Well, that’s just fine._

It was almost ridiculous the trepidation with which he treated him. Certainly, it should be the other way around. Bixby had all the money, all the power, held all the cards. What the hell did Endeavour have? An overdrawn account and a record player.

Once day, Bixby called him to his study. He was dithering about behind his desk in a very un-Bixby like way. It was almost as if he was afraid of him. But why? It was Endeavour who was afraid and who had cause for fear.

“I,” Bixby began. “I’ve had the butler at my London house forward my mail and a few other things. I know you weren’t completely happy, about my taking that green notebook . . .”

Pagan winced. That was certainly an understatement. But Bixby was nothing if not diplomatic.

 . . . “but, I thought you should see this. I don’t know what it is exactly, but, it’s addressed to you.”

It was a brown package, and on it was written his own name with an unfamiliar London address—Endeavour felt a jolt at the sight. It was almost like there was another of him, an Endeavour whom he had never met who had lived a whole different life in London, just as he sometimes felt there was a Pagan who had followed Susan to Argentina and was now living in exile. There were two of them, actually—in one life, Bruce and Susan’s trust fund money held out and they lived like kings and queens, in the other funds ran low, and without papers, they ended up as low-paid laborers, washing dishes or hauling lumber.

There was the Morse who convinced Jim Strange earlier in the game, who had arrived to save Thursday as part of a cavalry, rather than alone, who had a pint with Thursday afterwards, who went, instead of to prison, to work the next morning at the nick. This Morse asked Monica to marry him. One Monica said no, and Morse ended up moving to a different flat to avoid awkward moments in the hallway. And there was the Monica who said yes, and they went to their children’s football matches, and he looked to her to figure out when to cheer.

 

Endeavour wandered off with the package and opened it in front of the big airy windows on the cream and red carpet in the drawing room. On top, there was a letter, from someone named Matthew Turner, And under that, a thick set of proofs, as for a book. Endeavour flipped the pages open and felt his breath leave him. It was his words, his words there, they had his words. . . .

But set in such neat little type, they seemed somehow removed from him. It was all right. It was all right. He looked at the letter, but only a few words leapt out at him among the elaborate niceties and legal jargon. An offer of an advance of two thousand pounds. Sixty percent royalties.

 _Two thousand pounds_. That was maybe nothing to Bixby. Change to blow in Paris, buying expensive champagne and staying in a five-star hotel with a concierge to do a hundred things one could easily do for one’s self.

But it was enough to cover whatever he might be costing, surely.

Endeavour looked at the proofs again. On the front, his name, set in typeface, seemed not like his name. It was something that didn’t touch him like he would have thought it would.  

Matthew Turner. Could he sell a part of himself to this faceless man, a part so strangely repackaged anyway, so much so as to not seem _that_ much like himself, in order to buy himself back from another?

If he gave Bixby two thousand pounds, they would be even, wouldn’t they? And they could meet there on a darkling plain, not Bixby waiting for Pagan to knee him and disappear into the trees or Endeavour waiting for Bixby to send him off down the road without even the means to get back to England. They would meet for the first time, face to face, they’d be equals in this world that was . . .

dark and confusing and was . . .

 . . . and was dark green and spinning and he couldn’t tell where one moment ended and another . . .

and he breathes quietly in a dark world, and the world begins to reform around him. He feels the mattress beneath him, the pull of the ropes on his wrists, the tightness of the silk blindfold around his face. There’s a smell of coffee from another room and voices that he can’t hear.  Strange memories of someone holding a glass to his face, of leading him down halls, spooning porridge in his mouth as if he were an infant. 

  
Well. To hell with that.

He’s not sure how long he lies there, but, eventually, he hears footsteps coming up the stairs. A door opens.

“Hey.” And then there is a rough hand on his shoulder. “Hey Morse. You awake? Morse?”

“Yes,” Endeavour says.

Hands are pulling him up. “OK, sweetheart, time to go home.”

******

He’s been sitting in a chair for a few minutes now, and slowly, he feels like he’s coming back to himself. He can actually think somewhat clearly—clearly enough that he can go through his entire plan. There’s only one obstacle left.

“I certainly hope you aren’t planning to throw me in the boot again,” Endeavour says. “How is that going to look?”

“What do you know about it?” Luc asks suspiciously.

“Not a lot, but I certainly remember it was freezing in there. The temperature is still dropping down at night, after all, isn’t it?  

“Oh, is it?” the man taunts, mimicking his English accent. He knows he sounds ridiculous sometimes: he does that too often, he knows, thinking in English first, then translating in his head.

“Well, it’s certainly up to you. But if Bixby has decided to forgive me to the point that he’s willing to bring you a priceless painting in exchange for my return, it might not look particularly spectacular when you haul me out of the boot like a lot of luggage. You may have won out this time, but I wouldn’t be so keen on crossing Bixby too much, if I were you.  Some of the people he deals with are . . . well. . .. I mean, just think about it: who do you think told him he might find that painting in that shop? You don’t suppose he just stumbled upon it, do you? He doesn’t know much about art, does he?”

“What people?”

“I don’t know. I just know there were lots of strange people coming to the house. Bixby was talking with them for hours. Well, actually it was just one man he spoke to. I think the rest were simply his thugs. They certainly had terrible manners. They just sort of stood around and scowled. Might not have been their fault, though. Come to think of it, I don’t think they spoke English or French.”

“Where were they from then?”

“Sicily, I had thought. “

“Christ, Luc, we don’t want the goddamned mafia getting involved in this.”

“All right,” says Luc.  “All right. We’ll make this exchange, and you just be sure to tell Bix we treated you like a goddamned prince, all right?”

“Well, I don’t know about _that,_ ” Endeavour says. “But on the other hand, I don’t have any great complaints. I can’t say I’d ever like to relive these past few days, but you could easily have been worse.”

 “OK, fine, just keep you head down and you’ll be home in a few hours. And you be sure to tell Bix that everything was just peachy, right? No hard feelings on either side. Fair is fair and we’re even. Don’t kid yourself that we don’t have connections ourselves. What do you think we are, a bunch of amateurs?”

“No, no,” Endeavour says. “This has all been very impressively done, old man.”

There’s a silence, and Endeavour can feel their eyes on him, regarding him with suspicion. Perhaps that went too far.

Endeavour has no idea how Bixby does this every day. It’s only been ten minutes of slogging out this rubbish, and he’s exhausted.

But when they get to the car, they put him in the backseat and shove his head down, so he’s lying across the seat, out of sight of the windows.

He can’t believe he’s pulled it off. There’s nothing left now. Nothing to stop him.

****

Once he’s lying on the back seat, the band of dark green silk tight around his face, he begins to work quietly but ruthlessly on the rope binding his wrists. He can’t see anything, but he can make distinctions between light and dark. When all goes completely black, when there seem to be no streetlights, he’ll assume they’re driving along the edge of the Forest of Darney.  

It’s appropriate, he supposes, that he’ll make his stand there.

He always felt a pang of guilt whenever he thought of his birthday—he knew that Bixby had probably made a series of elaborate plans—things like that were always important to him; he always wanted to do everything just so.

But it was the eyes. They seemed to be everywhere. Endeavour had wanted to run, but he forced himself to walk calmly. To look down at the early autumn yellow leaves at his feet. Not at the eyes. Looking at him sideways. Watching and then darting away and then watching. 

That was how it always started. It was just like with his father, just like with Gwen, just like with Susan, just like he thought it would be with Bixby when first he met him—-it was all just another game you couldn’t win.

But it wasn’t just a game.

If you looked,  it was, “What are you looking at?”  It was better not to look, it was better to look down, to avoid eye contact, but even that was not foolproof.

_“So you think you’re too good for me, college boy?”_

And there was a cool September wind on his nape and a shiver and he had wanted to run.

And he’s always been running away, from Lincolnshire, from Oxford, from the police, from all of Great Britain.

But now, in the Forest of Darney, he’ll be making his stand. For the first time, ever, he’s not running away from something. He’s running to something.

    

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame:

A tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

 Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; _myself_ it speaks and spells,

Crying what I do is me, for that I came.

 

“What the hell are you saying?” Luc asks.

“Nothing,” Endeavour says.

And this will be his act, and his choice: he’ll catch fire and he’ll draw flame; he’ll ring out like a bell and, for once, he will fling out broad his name.

And he can’t lose. Because even if he loses, he’ll win. Because even if he is eventually caught or killed, he will have first led them on such a chase that it will be clear that he had tried to escape.

And his flight will speak and spell, it will cry _what I do is me_. And Bixby will know that he had tried to come back to him. He’ll know that he loved him, even if he never quite told him that.

He pulls again on the ropes, twists his hands, and then he hears it—a sickening, ripping sound that’s followed by a sharp pain that burns down his wrist.  Has he dislocated his thumb, perhaps? Whatever the hell he’s done, his right hand feels more pliant, and he realizes he can slip it out of the bonds. He moves his hands slightly up, testing the new slackness of the ropes, but he keeps them behind him, out of sight of the two men up front.  

 Then there’s a soft click and a burst of static form the radio. A man is giving the news, and Endeavour listens, idly wondering what he’s been missing in the world. They always speak so quickly when they give the news, though, always use such complicated tenses. Then, another announcer comes on, and there’s a torrent of drums. God, it’s awful. Just one more reason to get out of here.

Luc and Antonio seem to like it, though; one of them seems to be hitting the dashboard, as if he’s playing a drum along with the band on the radio. Well, if it keeps them distracted, Endeavour will have to endure it.

Then there’s singing—it’s an English song, of all things. Dear God, must he even be assaulted by his own language?

_Jennifer sometimes sits in the sunshine_

_Playing with her hair_

_Go back to the old school_

_Sit under a toadstool_

_There’s nobody there_.

Goodness, what drivel. _There’s nobody there?_ And the singer is dreadful. The whole lot of them should be taken out and shot.

But, the thing is: Antonio and Luc seem to like the song. So much so that they begin singing. Endeavour almost wants to laugh. He never dreamed they might be this diverted. This might be good for an extra few seconds lead time. He begins to count to himself, to give himself the courage to make his leap.

Because the world has turned to black, so they must be in the forest.

10 9 8

And he’ll have to be quick.

7 6 5

It’s the last thing they’ll expect, so he’ll have the advantage of surprise.

4 3 2

He just can’t squander those first precious moments. He’ll have to hit the ground running.

1

Literally.

With one deft movement, he pulls his right hand loose, rips the blindfold off with his left, pops the door lock, pushes open the door, and throws himself out, shoulder first, onto the grass.

And he’s rolling and rolling . . . He can’t tell which is the earth and which is the sky, and he hears the squeal of car brakes.

He pops to his feet and he’s running. And he’s running and all he is _is_ running.

And the woods are dark and dappled, all shades of black and gray and black-green in the moonlight.

His lungs are burning and he feels his heart will burst; he must have lost them by now. But, no. He hears footsteps behind him—just one set: they must have split up.

He can’t believe that one of them could catch up to him: whoever is following him must be fast. He sees a large branch in his path and makes a split decision. He picks it up—for a moment he worries that it might be rotted, but it’s thick and strong and heavy in his hands. He ducks behind a tree.

Then he hears the footsteps growing closer. When they sound as if they are almost upon him, he springs out from behind the tree, the branch held high.

The man stops, clearly startled. It’s Antonio, the man that Endeavour accidentally looked at the day they left him in the bathroom. The man’s eyes widen for just a moment in fear, but then he smiles.  “Come on, now,” he says. “Put the stick down, Endeavour.”

In reply, Endeavour slams it across the man’s face—not as hard as he might have; he doesn’t want to fracture the man’s skull—the man could have been a hundred times worse to him, he knows. He just wants to knock him out, stop him from trailing him deeper into the woods. The man falls back on the ground, clutching his face. 

Endeavour watches hopefully, but, in a moment, the man is up again, wiping at his bloodied nose. And there is murder in his eyes.  

“Why you . . .”

This time, Endeavour gives it all he’s got.

 

**** *************

Bixby and Thursday are driving on the A33 along the edge of the Forest of Darney, when they see an abandoned car, half swerved onto the grassy shoulder, with three of its doors left wide open.

“Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself in a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost,” Bixby thinks ruefully.

Well, here he is, nearly thirty-five and on the edge of the forest dark. He has had a lot of experiences in his life, and he’s seen more of this great world than most people have, but he can’t say he’s ever chased potentially armed art thieves through a dark forest in the middle of nowhere.

It’s one hell of a midlife crisis anyhow. Couldn’t he and Endeavour just have gone and blown a few thousand francs during a decadent weekend in Paris? Or couldn’t he just have bought a small plane? He’d always wanted to get his pilot’s license.

Thursday runs to the abandoned car, and Bixby follows. Both of the front doors and one of the back doors are thrown open, as if the occupants of the car had jumped out without bothering to close them.

Thursday walks back and is looking down at the ground. In the distance, just on the edge of hearing, come the wail of sirens. Mrs. Thursday has timed her call perfectly, then.

Bixby is not sure what Thursday is looking for, but then, he gestures for Bixby to come over. There’s a sharp indentation in the soft earth not far from the road, as if someone’s shoulder collided into the dirt. There are a few sharp footprints, where someone dug in, as if their owner had clambered up in a hurry, setting off on a desperate sprint.

They look much like the set of prints that had run alongside his in the snow on that day last January, when Endeavour had called him a twentieth-century dumb ox. He remembered taking note of them at the time, thinking how he never would have imagined he’d find anyone willing to leave such a long trail of prints with his, someone who would walk with him so far, someone willing to accept him for what he was without needing answers to every question.

He sets his foot down beside one of the prints, presses down, and then steps up, leaving a print of his own for comparison. The prints in the dirt measure against his exactly like the ones he remembers. Definitely Endeavour’s.

The French Inspector pulls up, and he and two officers spring out of their car. While Bixby is contemplating the prints, Thursday is speaking to the French Inspector, who, in turn, is translating to the two younger officers.

When the two young officers set off, Bixby moves to follow. But the Inspector puts a hand on Bixby’s shoulder to restrain him.

“We don’t need civilians getting in the way,” he says.

But Bixby ignores him.

He might lack police training and hand-to-hand combat skills. But there is one point on which he is positive he has the advantage. It’s his heart, after all, that is out there hiding in the trees.  

And when it comes to finding Pagan in the woods, he’s pretty sure he has everyone else present beat hands down.

****

Bixby sets off through the forest, his ears alert to the rustle of leaves, watching for the gleam of Pagan’s pale face in the moonlight.  He’s run fairly far into the forest when he sees a body ahead, lying prone on the ground in the path. He can see, even from the distance, that it isn’t Endeavour, but he runs up to it all the same. It’s a short, thicker-set man with dark brown hair and a neat, dark brown beard.  And his face is covered in blood, his nose definitely broken at the least. A branch lies tossed nearby, as if someone had clobbered the man with it.

He hears a voice behind him. It’s Thursday. “Huh. Well. Alright then, Morse.”

That’s just what Bixby had thought.

Thursday stops to look over the man, but Bixby gets up and continues on his way. If things have come to this pass, to the point that Endeavour is beating people bloody across the face with a stick, he doesn’t know what to think.

 

Bixby runs on, through the trees, but there is no sign of Endeavour.  

He’s beginning to feel apprehensive; where can he be? He was so sure he would find him easily.

He flies around a turn in the path, and, suddenly, he’s face to face with a broad-shouldered man with short cropped brown hair. The man startles for a moment, and then holds out his arm, pointing a gun at his chest.

“Fancy meeting you here,” the man says. “So, do you have the painting on not?”

Bixby freezes. Then, in only the space of a heartbeat, he remembers his mask. “Of course, old man. There’s no need for all of this.”

“Tell that to that flighty fairy. He’s the one what escalated this. We had your instructions all spelt out on a note on the door of the house. You could have left the painting in a shed we had out back, he would have been sent out the door, and nobody would have had to see anybody. And that would have been that.”

Just then, Bixby hears a rustle in the tree above. He looks up. There, through the branches, luminous in the starlight, are the overlarge blue eyes he first saw at a party in Oxford, nearly two years ago. It’s Endeavour, perched up in a tree.

Despite himself, the man with the gun looks unnerved, jerks his head, looks behind him.

“Nice try, Bix. That’s the oldest trick in the book.”

Bixby smiles broadly, “Well, that’s me outdone, isn’t it? But really, you can’t blame a fellow for trying.”  

He chances a second glance up into the tree. Endeavour is looking straight at him, his face expressionless. He holds up one hand, an end of rope hanging from his wrist, and gestures for him to come closer.

Uh, what?

Has he lost his mind? Or is he angry with me for not figuring things out sooner? Bixby thinks.

He wants me to walk towards a man holding a gun right at my chest?

He looks again. Endeavour’s eyes widen alarmingly, as if to say,” just do it for heaven’s sake.”

Well. All right, then.  

Bixby takes a step forward. “Look here old man. I don’t have a lot of time for this.”

To Bixby’s surprise, the man seems a bit overwhelmed by this display of confidence, or recklessness, and takes a step back.

Bixby chances another glance up into the tree—the face he sees is strangely impassive, watching the scene below with a cool confidence he would not have thought Endeavour capable of maintaining.

So, DC Morse then. Nice to meet you. I’m glad one of the four of us knows how to handle these sorts of situations.

Endeavour’s eyes widen again. He can hear his voice in his mind.

_Stop making ridiculous jokes and pay attention._

Well. That’s fine then.

“Now why don’t you put that gun down and we can settle this like gentlemen, yes?” Bixby says, taking two more steps forward. “I came prepared to make a deal, fair and square, but I’ve no patience with a lot of ugly threats.”  

Bixby had wondered if he would know the men from the way the one had spoken to him on the phone, and it turns out, he thinks he does recognize this pug-faced punk.  Yes, he was one of Girard’s toadies. Bixby supposed he must have taken on higher aspirations than extortion and money laundering. He always was a bit of a preening idiot.

“Who are you to make demands?” the man asks, but he takes a step or two back, “I’m the one holding the gun, aren’t I?”

“You certainly are,” Bixby smiles and laughs. “But I’m the one holding the cards. I’ve got the painting and you don’t seem to have Endeavour, so. . . .”  he holds his hands out, as if the end of that syllogism is self-explanatory. He takes a few more steps forward, and the man, surprised at the extent of his unmistakable bravado or unforgivable folly, takes two more steps back.

“Where is the painting then, huh?” he asks.

“Oh, I have it well hidden,” Bixby replies. “So if you kill me, I’m afraid you’ll never find it. You’ll be up on murder charges and all of your hard work will have been such an awful waste. But, if you put that gun down, we can. . .”  Bixby takes two more steps forward.  

The man steps back. “You just stay where you are or I’ll . . .”

But what he would do, he never gets the chance to say. At that moment, five feet ten inches of sinew and bone drops from the tree, knocking the man to the ground.

The man cries out in surprise and pain, his voice echoing eerily through the trees. Then he is struggling wildly, but Endeavour straddles him, grabs his arms and twists them behind his back. The man shouts all sorts of threats, but Endeavour holds firm.  
  


Endeavour turns around and shouts something at Bixby, but there are other words ringing through his mind.

_My heart in hiding stirred for a bird, the achieve of the mastery of the thing._

“Would you help me get this off?” Endeavour calls. “Joss?”

Oh, yes. Bixby undoes the rope that is still tied at Endeavour’s left wrist, and Endeavour grabs it from him and wraps it around the wrists of the man he has down on the ground.

At that moment Thursday and the French Inspector, no doubt alerted by the surprised and then angry shouts of the pug-faced man, appear running through the trees. Bixby is beyond grateful to have the backup. He’s a bit out of his element.

The man is still struggling, and Endeavour, preparing to bind the man’s wrists, pulls the man’s arms back with an extra vicious flourish, tearing a howl from the man’s throat.

“Christ, Morse,” Thursday says.

“What?” Endeavour snaps, jerking his head up, his eyes a bit wild in the half-light.

Thursday pursues his lips and shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says, “nothing.” The old man actually looks a bit proud, as if Morse is learning at last.

Bixby wouldn’t place any bets on that. The original plan and execution might have been the glimmer of Morse, but that parting shot seems like pure Pagan.

 

The French constables arrive on the scene, and they lead the man off into the woods, back to where the cars are waiting. Thursday and the Inspector set off in their wake, walking side by side. Bixby starts to follow, but there is a warm hand tugging on the back of his jacket. He turns, and Endeavour presses his mouth to his.

Bixby opens his lips to deepen the kiss, and in an instant, his world, one of colored lights and masks and laughter that sounds like breaking glass, fades and silences, becomes as deep as a dark and endless forest under an endless sky of stars. And Bixby is real again.

******

Back at the car, Bixby can’t help but wonder. Perhaps, in a strange way, this might have been—just possibly, let’s say— a good thing? Endeavour has just taken down two men single-handedly after all—might that give him some of his confidence back?

Because it was actually pretty thrilling to watch.

But once they are in the car, Endeavour seems to slump, as if he’d been pulsing with adrenaline and now has nothing left in him.

“If ever I get home,” he says, as if that’s only still a possibility and not a certainty at this point, “I’m never leaving the house again.”

Then he leans sideways and rests his head against the window.

Thursday looks at Endeavour, confused, and Bixby tries to smile. But he feels his heart sink all the same.

*****

Endeavour, it transpires, has a point about the “if ever.”  In retrospect, Bixby had no idea why he thought they would be allowed to simply go home then and there.

First, Endeavour is taken to the hospital, where he is relatively uncooperative, seeming to view the visit as only one more delay between him and his goal of getting home and staying there until the end of his days. But his wrists are a shredded mess, and he’s possibly in need of antibiotics.

When Endeavour, trying to convince the people at the hospital to let him go, dismisses the whole ordeal by explaining that he was sedated most of the time, injected with some sort of drug, and had only the foggiest memories of the whole week anyway, Bixby feels a chill. Needles opened a whole new realm of possible contaminants---and, even if they had been careful—it seemed an onslaught of mind-altering drugs would be the last thing that Endeavour needed.

The doctor runs several tests, drawing blood into syringes as Endeavor turns white-faced away, staring blankly at the wall.

The police question him as well. Again, he is fairly uncooperative—whether because he’s annoyed or confused, Bixby isn’t sure. He rambles quite a lot, about grackles and rowboats and potatoes.

He is clear on one point. “They kept moving me about,” he said. “They said that they didn’t need to worry much about the police finding us—that someone called Phillipe would give them a warning if the police were drawing near.”

So. P. Brassard then. Bixby tells the Inspector of his suspicions—the pattern he had noticed at the house, and the Inspector nods grimly.

It seems to take an age, but finally, they are cleared to leave. Thursday takes the wheel of Bixby’s Jag, and Bixby slides into the back seat, where Endeavour half-collapses against him.

“God that was awful,” Endeavour says, and then shudders. Bixby wonders what he might be alluding to, when Endeavour says, “You should have heard the music they were listening to in the car. It was like being trapped in some ring of Dante’s Inferno.”

Bixby has to refrain from rolling his eyes. Only Endeavour could be abducted for a week and find listening to some objectionable music as the most grueling part of the whole ordeal. He’s half tempted to ask him what the song was that so offended him, but what would be the point? It’s likely he has no idea. Probably something by the Rolling Stones or the Wildwood or some other group known to only everyone else on the entire planet.

Endeavour leans forward in the seat, “Would you turn on the radio?” he asks Thursday. Thursday complies, and the strains of a string orchestra fill the silence of the night.

“This all right?” Thursday asks. “I’ll have no time to be playing silly buggers with the dial, since I’m driving on the wrong side of the road.”

“It’s fine,” Endeavour says. He slumps back and shudders again. “I just want to purge my ears of that drivel.”

*******

When they get home, Endeavour proves true to his word: he doesn’t leave the house.

 “Why should I?” he asks. “I can just send Turner things in the mail. He can call me if he wants anything.”

********

Once Endeavour’s settled, the Thursdays take their long-postponed trip to Provence. Bixby hopes that their return will at least prompt Endeavour to get dressed and be a courteous host, but no. A few days later, when Bixby comes into the dining room where Endeavour and the Thursdays are having a late tea and chatting about the Thursdays’ trip, there he is— loafing around in pajama bottoms and a ridiculous t-shirt that Esme bought for him when she interviewed at the Sorbonne, one that has a blue cartoon dog on it and says Je ❤Paris.

Bixby frowns. You would think he’d have enough manners to put on some decent clothes. He does still have guests.

If Bixby didn’t know any better, he’d almost suspect that Endeavour is doing this on purpose: he knows Bixby, having the standards that he does, wound never dream of requiring him to leave the house as long as he remains in a t-shirt picked out by a sixteen-year-old girl and a pair of flannel pajama bottoms that look like he must have owned them since he lived in Lincolnshire.

He hates to see Endeavour this way—partly, he realizes, because it makes him feels a bit guilty. The truth is, five years ago, he would have been delighted to have a lover who simply lounged around his house all day, who did nothing but laid around on his carpet listening to records, temptingly available to him twenty-four seven.

It would have seemed a luxury, given him a little thrill, even, to have had that sort of power. But that had been a theoretical, faceless person; it’s not a life he wants for Endeavour. He can’t imagine how living in the same twenty-seven rooms could be good for him. It’s like he’s still at the lake house. Or even like he’s still in prison, just one that’s rather better appointed.

The Thursdays seem to take it all in stride. They go out for walks, out to dinner in the village. When they come home, they chat with him in the drawing room, acting as if it’s perfectly natural for a grown man to be in his jim jams all day like an eight-year-old with a bad cold.

 But, after all, he was missing for a week, Bixby thinks. Maybe he just needs some time.

 

****

The Thursdays return to England, long weeks pass, and Endeavour remains firmly rooted in the house. Bixby does what he can from home, but eventually he does need to go to Paris.

“You’ll be all right?” Bixby asks, as he’s preparing to leave.

“Of course,” Endeavour says, looking up from his book. “Be here when you get back.”

There once was a time that would have seemed reassuring.

Well, Bixby thinks. Be careful what you wish for.

****

The traffic is terrible on the way out of Paris, and the drive home is a long one.  It’s early evening, the sun fading and the sky just beginning to purple in the east, by the time Bixby makes the last turn off the main road and onto their drive.

He rounds the last corner—following a curve lined with straight, tall fir trees that are just beginning to fade from green to green-black in the falling light— and then, there’s the house. And it’s home, and it’s even a more welcome sight than he had anticipated.

Because Endeavour is there, walking down the long drive. It’s the perfect picture, the perfect homecoming.

He looks good, too—his crisp white shirt tucked in to show off a narrow waist, and his messenger bag, slung diagonally over his shoulder, slapping as he walks against his pert arse in a way that makes Bixby quite envy it.

So what’s this? Did he just get bored, then? Or was a day without Bixby’s pointed looks enough to give him the time to decide to venture out on his own accord? Perhaps Bixby should have left weeks ago.

  

He eases off the gas as he begins to approach Endeavour. He knows Endeavour hates this sort of nonsense, but he can’t resist. As he draws near, he slows the car down to a crawl and looks over at him, pulling his sunglasses down low, so that he’s appraising him over the lenses.

“Hey Baby, what’s your name?”

He says it as a throwaway joke, an unbearably trite line.

It’s not until after he says it that he realizes all of the ramifications of asking Endeavour this particular question.

And, as expected, Endeavour looks annoyed as hell. And then it hits Bixby.

_He knows. It’s not just a quirk I’ve noticed. It’s actually how he thinks._

_And he knows that I know._

Endeavour looks at him blankly, then crosses his arm and scowls, as if turning the question over in his mind.  

“Josephine,” he says finally. Then he turns on his heel and stalks off.

Well, good God.

Ask a wiseacre question, get a wiseacre answer.

Well, that’s fine. After all, it isn’t as if Endeavour isn’t shrewd enough to have puzzled parts of him out.

Bless his little heart.

But Josephine. _Merde._ He’ll be sorry for that one.

He eases his foot onto the gas, slowly following Endeavour down the drive.

“So, Josephine, why don’t you get in the car?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“C’mon, then. It’ll be fun. I’ll take you to Italy. I’ll show you a chapel where a fabulous painting is being restored. It’s one I actually owned once. Or we could go to that Rijksmuseum. Where is it, anyway?”

“I don’t want to look at any paintings.”

“It’s going to be a rather beautiful night,” Bixby persists. “What on earth is the point of having a canary yellow Jaguar convertible if you aren’t going to run away with somebody in it?”

Endeavour stops, still looking faintly annoyed, but now at least he seems to be considering the matter.

“Well, if you are set on going somewhere, I’d sooner go into Germany,” he says. “I really could do with a beer.”

“Then get in, then,” Bixby says.

And Endeavour does.

 

Bixby knows there are plenty of people who might not understand his reasoning.

But as soon as Pagan looked at the band as if he by doing so he hoped to reduce it to ashes, as soon as he dismissed him with an “I can’t hear you” and a turn of his head, Bixby had chosen him for himself.

He may be curst in company, Bixby thinks, but ‘tis incredible to believe how much he loves me.

And if he and I be pleased, what’s that to the wide world?

 


End file.
